EliseAI, a developer of AI-powered property management tools for property owners, has raised $75 million in a Series D round, bringing the company's valuation to $1 billion.
EliseAI is the brainchild of co-founder and CEO Minna Song, who met the company's second co-founder, Tony Stoyanov, while they were undergraduates at Cambridge University. After graduating, Song moved to New York City and worked as an administrative assistant for a residential real estate company.
At the company, Song said he found that inefficiencies in the rental and leasing industry, particularly when it came to messaging to current and prospective tenants, were leading to exhaustion and burnout among executives.
“Recognizing this challenge, Stoyanova and I began developing AI software to automate communications,” Song told TechCrunch, “and founded EliseAI in 2017.”
EliseAI currently employs a number of chatbots that respond to text messages, emails, and phone calls from renters about apartment viewings, maintenance requests, lease renewals, overdue payments, etc. Song says the chatbots are trained on the questions and conversations of renters (both those looking to rent an apartment and current residents) and are designed to automatically hand off requests to humans when necessary.
Image credit: EliseAI
“We only use data that we generate internally,” Song says. “We don't buy or use external data, which gives us control over the data we use.”
As a privacy-conscious person in general, I'm wary of texting personal information to a chatbot like EliseAI or volunteering to chat with them to train the company's AI, so I asked Song about EliseAI's data retention policy. Song said the company allows users to request deletion of their data, choose not to provide their information for training, and receive a copy of their data held by EliseAI in accordance with laws such as the California Consumer Privacy Act.
“We do not sell, sublicense or otherwise share consumer data for any purpose,” Song added. “Consumer data is the exclusive property of our relevant customers (property managers or owners), and we use that data only for the limited purposes expressly permitted by our customer agreements, privacy policies and applicable law.”
Some reviews of EliseAI's chatbot have been critical, suggesting that nuance is not AI's forte: One reviewer said the chatbot, which doesn't explicitly identify as AI, sometimes doesn't engage managers or agents when it should, or schedules viewings without key information like move-in dates or phone numbers.
But Song argues that EliseAI's chatbot is “continuously improving its ability to predict renters' needs,” and that the company's internal data shows that it has, on average, increased leasing tour bookings by 125% and reduced late fees by 50%.
Image credit: EliseAI
“Our technology is designed for multifamily and single-family rental property owners, operators and third-party property management companies to drive operational efficiencies, reduce the tech stack and costs associated with single-point solutions, increase occupancy rates, reduce delinquent fees and improve renter experience,” Song said.
In addition to the chatbot, EliseAI also offers a dashboard that property managers can use to stay on top of prospect and resident requests (such as work orders), generate reports on operations, and track the progress of renewals. The dashboard comes free with EliseAI's AI product, and the company offers it as a module priced according to a software-as-a-service model.
EliseAI competes with vendors such as Colleen AI, Funnel, Knock and Leasehawk. Song said the company has more than 350 customers, including 70% of the top 50 U.S. rental property managers.
“We have not pursued rapid headcount growth, instead focusing on controlled hiring and sustainable burn management while making continued strategic investments in revenue growth,” Song said. “We continue to see robust funding for companies like EliseAI that are effectively addressing enduring enterprise challenges such as operational efficiency, particularly in underlying markets where demand is always there, such as residential.”
EliseAI, which employs about 150 full-time employees in its New York office, has just raised a new round of funding and is planning to expand further into an unexpected market: healthcare. Song sees much of the company's tech stack as applicable to the administrative needs of medical clinics, including appointment scheduling, billing and payments.
In fact, EliseAI is launching a healthcare solution called HealthAI in 2023, and Song said several providers are already using it.
Image credit: EliseAI
But it's a competitive market, and EliseAI will have to compete with startups such as Hyro, which uses AI to handle text and voice conversations between healthcare providers and patients.
The round was led by Sapphire Ventures, with participation from Point72 Private Investments, Divco West, Navitas Capital and Koch Real Estate Investments. This brings ErisAI's total funding to $140 million, and Song said the new funding will be used to support hiring, AI research and development, product development and go-to-market efforts for ErisAI.
“Our primary focus was to bring a great partner to the business, which is why we chose Sapphire,” Song added. Sapphire partner Cathy Gao will join EliseAI's board of directors.
“While EliseAI is currently the most widely adopted AI platform in the sector, the residential real estate market is still in the early stages of leveraging AI's full potential,” Gao said in a statement. “We have led the way in the residential sector and believe we are well positioned to achieve similar results in new sectors such as healthcare.”