EliseAI Gets $75M for Chatbots That Help Property Managers Engage with Tenants

EliseAI, a company developing a suite of AI-powered property management tools for landlords, has raised $75 million in a Series D funding round, valuing the startup at $1 billion.

EliseAI is the brainchild of co-founder and CEO Minna Song, who met co-founder Tony Stoyanov while they were both undergraduates at Cambridge University. After graduating, Song moved to New York City to work as an administrative assistant for a residential real estate firm.

At her firm, Song noticed how inefficiencies in the leasing and real estate industry—especially inefficiencies in communicating with current and prospective tenants—contributed to exhaustion and burnout among management teams.

“Recognizing this challenge, Stoyanova and I began building AI software to automate communications,” Song told TechCrunch, “and in 2017 we founded EliseAI.”

EliseAI currently employs an army of chatbots to send text messages, emails, and respond to calls from tenants about things like apartment tours, maintenance requests, lease renewals, and arrears. Song says the chatbots are trained on questions and conversations from tenants—both apartment seekers and current tenants—and designed to automatically relay requests to humans when necessary.

“We only use data that we generate internally,” Song said. “We don’t buy or use external data. That gives us control over the data that we use.”

As someone who generally cares about privacy, I’d be wary of texting chatbots like EliseAI with any personal information — and volunteering to chat for the company’s AI training. So I asked Song about EliseAI’s data retention policy. She said the company allows users to request deletion of their data, opt out of having their information shared for training purposes, and, under laws like the California Consumer Privacy Act, receive a copy of any data EliseAI has on them.

“We do not sell, license, or share consumer data for any purpose,” Song added. “Consumer data is the sole property of our applicable client—the property manager or owner—and we use that data only for limited purposes expressly permitted by our customer agreements, our privacy policy, and applicable law.”

Some reviews of EliseAI’s chatbots are critical, suggesting that nuance isn’t AI’s strong suit. According to one reviewer, the chatbots — which don’t explicitly identify themselves as AI — sometimes fail to engage managers and agents when they should, booking property tours without key information like move-in date or phone number.

However, Song says EliseAI’s chatbots are “continuously improving their ability to anticipate renter needs” and are, on average, increasing leasing trip bookings by 125% while reducing delinquent payments by 50%, according to internal company data.

“Our technology is designed for multifamily and single-family rental property owners, operators and third-party property management companies to increase operational efficiency, reduce the technology stack and costs associated with single-point solutions, increase occupancy, reduce delinquencies and improve the tenant experience,” Song said.

In addition to chatbots, EliseAI offers a dashboard where property managers can track requests from prospects and residents (such as work orders), generate operations reports, and track the progress of renewals. The dashboard is free with any of EliseAI’s AI products, which the company offers as modules priced on a software-as-a-service model.

EliseAI competes with vendors including Colleen AI, Funnel, Knock and Leasehawk. Song says the company has more than 350 customers, including 70% of the top 50 rental operators in the U.S.

“We didn’t pursue hyper-growth in headcount, instead focusing on controlled hiring and sustainable consumption management while continuing to strategically invest in revenue growth,” Song said. “We saw funding remain strong for companies like EliseAI that effectively address persistent enterprise challenges like operational efficiency, especially in core markets like housing, where demand is always high.”

With another successful round of funding under its belt, EliseAI, which employs about 150 full-time employees in its New York offices, is looking to expand further into a somewhat unexpected market: healthcare. Song believes much of the company’s technology can be adapted to the administrative needs of clinics, such as scheduling, billing, and payments.

Indeed, in 2023, EliseAI launched a healthcare solution called HealthAI, and Song says many providers are already using it.

It’s a crowded market, though; EliseAI will have to compete with startups like Hyro that are similarly using AI to power text and voice conversations between healthcare providers and their patients.

Sapphire Ventures led the round with participation from Point72 Private Investments, Divco West, Navitas Capital and Koch Real Estate Investments. The total amount raised by EliseAI was $140 million, and the new capital will be used for hiring, AI R&D, product development and supporting EliseAI’s go-to-market efforts, Song said.

“Our primary goal was to find the perfect business partner; that’s why we chose Sapphire,” Song added. Sapphire partner Cathy Gao will join EliseAI’s board.

“While EliseAI is currently the most widely adopted AI platform in this space, the residential real estate market is still in the early stages of realizing the potential of AI,” Gao said in a statement. “I believe the company is well-positioned to lead the way in residential construction and deliver similar results in emerging verticals such as healthcare.”