EliseAI: Replacing real estate agents with AI

(3 minutes)

Hi 👋, this is the Today in AI Newsletter: The weekly newsletter bringing you one step closer to building your own startup.

We analyze a cool, industry-shaping AI startup every week, with a full breakdown of what they do, how they make money, how much they’ve raised, and the opportunity ahead. 

Let’s get to the good stuff in this email: 

• This AI startup is replacing real estate agents forever

• They’ve already partnered with 70% of the top 50 multifamily owners in the US

• They just raised a $75M Series D at a $1B valuation led by Sapphire Ventures 🦄 

So what’s the startup and who are the founders behind it? Here’s the story of EliseAI 📈

EliseAI was founded in 2017 by Minna Song and Tony Stoyanov in New York to completely reimagine the way landlords communicate with tenants. 

It’s essentially a suite of AI-powered property management tools for landlords to help tenants throughout their rental journey. 🏠

EliseAI has an army of chatbots to text, email, and respond to calls from renters about things like apartment tours, maintenance requests and lease renewals. 🤖

The chatbots are trained on renters’ questions, and only hand off requests to humans when necessary.

Today, EliseAI is active in 1 out of every 12 multifamily apartment units in the US.

Backstory 👀

Before starting EliseAI, both co-founders didn’t know a single thing about the real estate industry or the problems around it.

Minna came from a tech background, having studied CS at MIT with an exchange program at Cambridge University. 👾

Minna met Tony at the University of Cambridge and they became good friends from then on with their shared love 💫 for software engineering.

One day Minna started to learn about real estate because she wanted to help advance an industry that serves a fundamental need. 🏡 Housing is one of these needs that hasn't culturally changed in a long time.

She didn’t know anything about the industry so thought tech could be added to the mix and bring a whole different perspective.

Minna and Tony then started EliseAI and started looking for a problem in the industry to solve with automation.

Minna then took a job as an office manager for a real estate company to understand the ins and outs of the market. 🧐 This was a good opportunity to do a lot of research, talk to everybody and ask lots of questions.

She had been listening to see the real problems people were experiencing.

Only 1 week into the job, there was one very obvious thing that people would constantly complain about: Communication. 🗣️

Tenants would constantly complain about how agents would take too much time to get back to them, or not respond to inquiries at all.

Minna and Tony had to solve this problem.

With their backgrounds in software engineering, they thought they could automate the communication process and started building out the product. 💯 

📈 Overnight, they’d pretty much solved the problem and sold the software to their first property company.

How does EliseAI work?

The good thing about having a pure tech background is it allowed Minna and Tony to innovate from an outside perspective and solve problems in a different way.

They were only able to build something that automated the rental process because they were automation people.

The EliseAI platform automates property workflows throughout a renters entire journey with 3 main products:

• LeasingAI: Manages all prospects 24/7/365. Results in 125%+ greater lease conversion with 90%+ of work automated. 🦾

• ResidentAI: Manages all resident communication through chatbots. Results in 40%+ greater engagement and a 50%+ reduction in delinquencies. 🚀

• EliseCRM: The industry’s most advanced CRM, a hub for all resident info, prospect info and workflows, which is completely free for anyone to use.

All of these products are delivered with full AI automation over email, SMS, webchat and even voice.

EliseAI is the only AI platform in the industry to work with all property types from multifamily homes to affordable student housing.

The startup only uses internal data to train their chatbots for the utmost privacy. 🔒 

Stats 📊

🚀 EliseAI has already partnered with 350+ customers, including 70% of the top 50 multifamily owners and operators in the US.

These customers include property management firms like Bozzuto, Avalon Bay, Equity Residential, Invitation Homes and Asset Living to enhance operational efficiency and increase capacity.

💸 Since their Series C round last year, EliseAI has also grown ARR by 2.5x.

🦄 On August 14th 2024, EliseAI raised a $75M Series D at a $1B valuation bringing their total raised to $141.9M and officially making the startup a unicorn.

Sapphire Ventures led this round with participation from existing investors Point72 Ventures, Navitas Capital, Koch Investments Group and Divco West.

Before you go 👋

Thank you for reading.

Know someone who'd love this newsletter? Share the love. 🌟