EliseAI Achieves Unicorn Status with $75M Series D Funding for Real Estate and Healthcare AI

Real estate tech firm EliseAI was ahead of the curve. Now it's a unicorn

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More I used to work at a real estate tech website, and for a while there, much of what I thought about during the workday was "proptech," the convergence of property and new technology. It's also what the founders of EliseAI have spent the better part of the last 7 years working on, as well -- quietly designing AI systems (before the generative AI boom) to allow rental property owners and managers to better communicate with and respond to tenants using autonomous chatbots and voicebots. EliseAI's AI assistant is "used by 70% of the top 50 rental housing operators and owners in the country," according to co founder and CEO Minna Song, who joined VentureBeat for a video conference interview several days ago. That's equal to about one out of every 12 multifamily apartment units in the United States. It's not just EliseAI's big homeowner and property manager customers that believe in the company though: today, it announced a $75 million Series D funding round led by Sapphire Ventures at a valuation of more than $1 billion, cementing its position as the newest unicorn in the Big Apple. Founded in 2017 by Song and CTO Tony Stoyanov, EliseAI has recently expanded into bringing AI into healthcare communications as well, training models to act as voicebots that can receive calls from patients and schedule appointments on behalf of doctors and medical services providers. Technology and growth EliseAI's growth trajectory has been nothing short of remarkable. Since its Series C round last year, the company has seen its Annual Recurring Revenue increase by more than 2.5 times. "What we do is we sell an AI assistant that automates communication and daily operations for housing operators all over the United States," Song told VentureBeat. "Our AI automates about 90% of communication with renters across all communication channels."" The company's AI platform -- powered by "leading proprietary models" from OpenAI and other companies, as well as custom AI models -- offers a comprehensive suite of tools for property management: What sets EliseAI apart is its multi-modal approach, offering AI interactions via email, SMS, webchat, and voice, with a particular emphasis on its unique VoiceAI capability. It's not just cool technology for tech's sake -- the efficiency and lower overhead (that is, fewer human employees and turnover or loss of institutional knowledge when changing employees) that EliseAI's assistant provides actually translates to cost savings by its customers. "On average, our customers decrease overdue payments by 50%, so they can actually collect more money, which allows them to be able to do things like pay mortgages on time," Song noted. Expansion into healthcare In 2023, EliseAI leveraged its success in housing to enter the healthcare sector. Its HealthAI offering automates non-clinical tasks such as patient conversations, appointment scheduling, and billing. "Doctors have very specific appointment structures, and people lose a lot of money by not being able to kind of fill appointment slots, or people reschedule and cancel all the time," Song explained. "You want to make sure someone's schedule is all filled up, because that's most efficient for the doctor." The HealthAI system is fully HIPAA complaint and boasts the same SOC 2 security compliance of the real estate offerings, but is also "hooked up into the EMR systems, electronic medical record systems," according to Song. The system boasts an impressive 95% handling rate for patient inquiries, operating around the clock with no wait times. Funding allocation and future plans The fresh capital will be used to expand EliseAI's team, drive product innovation, and strengthen industry partnerships. The company currently employs over 130 people at its New York City headquarters and is actively hiring across various departments. Cathy Gao, Partner at Sapphire Ventures and new EliseAI board member, expressed enthusiasm about the partnership: "EliseAI's multi-modal AI platform has revolutionized customer interactions in the housing industry, we believe setting the standard for how purpose-built AI can deliver clear, measurable results with high accuracy and compliance to industry regulations." The next phase As one of the few vertical-focused AI companies operating at scale, EliseAI is well-positioned to capitalize on the growing demand for AI solutions in both the housing and healthcare industries. With its new unicorn status and substantial funding, the company is poised for continued growth and innovation in the coming years. The success of EliseAI underscores the potential for AI to transform traditional industries, improving efficiency and service quality while addressing critical operational challenges. As the company continues to expand its reach and capabilities, it will be interesting to watch how it shapes the future of housing and healthcare operations through the power of artificial intelligence.

Housing and healthcare AI startup EliseAI raises $75M and hits unicorn status - SiliconANGLE

Housing and healthcare AI startup EliseAI raises $75M and hits unicorn status Elise A.I. Technologies Corp., the creator of artificial intelligence-powered management tools for the housing and healthcare industries, said today it has become New York City's latest tech unicorn after closing on a $75 million late-stage round of funding. Today's Series D round was led by Sapphire Ventures and saw the participation of existing investors such as Navitas Capital, Point72 Private Investments, Divco West and Koch Real Estate Investments. The startup made its name in the real estate industry, providing an AI-powered platform that helps to automate tasks around property management and facilitate communications between landlords, property managers and renters. EliseAI's real estate offerings includes its flagship EliseCRM platform, which is free to use and acts as a kind of centralized hub for property managers, containing all of their resident information, workflows and report. It also sells various premium AI tools, including LeasingAI for managing prospects, which delivers a claimed 125% increase in lease conversions. There's also ResidentAI, which delivers an AI chatbot for communications with residents, resulting in a 40% increase in engagement and a 50% reduction in delinquencies. Using EliseAI's platform, property managers can communicate with renters through email, SMS, webchats and voice, and can even create a generative AI-powered chatbot using its VoiceAI tool, to automate responses to residents in real time. The company said its tools can be used with all property types, including multifamily homes, student housing and affordable housing. Having already become one of the most widely used management platforms in the housing industry, EliseAI saw an opportunity to bring its capabilities to the healthcare sector. Last year, it debuted its new HealthAI offering that helps healthcare organizations to automate non-clinical tasks such as patient conversations, appointment scheduling, billing and payments. The company reckons HealthAI can handle 95% of all patient inquiries continuously, with zero waiting time. To do this, it integrates with a wide rage of popular electronic health records, payment management systems and revenue cycle management tools, while ensuring full compliance with HIPAA and SOC2 Type II standards. EliseAI co-founder and Chief Executive Minna Song said both the housing and healthcare industries are facing serious operational challenges that AI can help to resolve. "Our mission to tackle these problems authentically resonates with everyone at our company, and we are committed to improving how these industries operate, making them more sustainable and accessible," he said. EliseAI said today's funding caps an impressive period of growth for the company, which has seen its annual recurring revenue increase by two and a half times since its Series C funding round last year, and become active in one out of every 12 multifamily apartment units in the U.S. Sapphire Ventures' partner Cathy Gao, who will take a seat on EliseAI's board of directors, said she's backing the company because it sets a new standard for how purpose-built AI can deliver clear and measurable benefits. EliseAI said the money from today's round will go toward expanding its team, with plans to hire across its engineering, product, sales, marketing and operations teams, and accelerate product innovation.

EliseAI lands $75M for chatbots that help property managers deal with renters | TechCrunch

EliseAI, a company developing a suite of AI-powered property management tools for landlords, has raised $75 million in a Series D round that values the startup at $1 billion. EliseAI is the brainchild of co-founder and CEO Minna Song, who met the company's second co-founder, Tony Stoyanov, while the two were undergraduate students at Cambridge. After graduating, Song moved to New York City, where she took a job as an administrative assistant at a residential real estate firm. At the firm, Song saw how inefficiencies in the rental and leasing industry -- particularly inefficiencies around messaging current and prospective tenants -- were contributing to management teams' exhaustion and burnout, she says. "Recognizing this challenge, Stoyanova and I began creating AI software to automate communication," Song told TechCrunch, "and we founded EliseAI in 2017." Today, EliseAI employs an army of chatbots to text with, email, and respond to calls from renters about things such as apartment tours, maintenance requests, lease renewals and delinquencies. Song says the chatbots are trained on renters' questions and conversations -- both people looking to lease apartments and current residents -- and designed to hand requests off to humans automatically where necessary. "We only use data that we generated internally," Song said. "We do not buy or use external data. This gives us control over the data we use." As a generally privacy-conscious person, I would be wary of texting chatbots like EliseAI's any personal information -- and volunteering chats for the company's AI training. So I asked Song about EliseAI's data retention policies. She said that the company lets users request that their data be deleted, opt out of providing their info for training and, in compliance with laws like the California Consumer Privacy Act, receive a copy of any data that EliseAI has on them. "We do not sell, re-license or otherwise share any consumer data for any purpose," Song added. "Consumer data is the exclusive property of our relevant customer -- a property manager or owner -- and we only use that data for limited purposes as expressly permitted by our customer contracts, our privacy policy, and applicable law." Some reviews of EliseAI's chatbots are critical and suggest that nuance isn't the AI's strong suit. According to one reviewer, the chatbots -- which don't clearly identify themselves as AI -- sometimes fail to loop in managers and agents when they should, and book tours of properties without key info such as a move-in date or phone number. Song, however, asserts that EliseAI's chatbots "continuously improve their ability to anticipate renter needs," and on average boost lease tour bookings by 125% while decreasing overdue payments by 50%, according to the company's internal data. "Our technology is designed for multifamily and single-family rental owners, operators and third-party property management companies to enhance operational efficiency, reduce tech stacks and costs associated with single-point solutions, increase occupancy, reduce delinquent payments and improve the renter experience," Song said. In addition to the chatbots, EliseAI offers a dashboard where property managers can keep tabs on prospects' and residents' requests (e.g. work orders), generate reports on operations and track the progress of renewals. The dashboard comes free with any of EliseAI's AI products, which the company offers as modules priced according to a software-as-a-service model. EliseAI competes with vendors including Colleen AI, Funnel, Knock and Leasehawk. Song says that the company has more than 350 customers, including 70% of the top 50 rental housing operators in the U.S. "We did not pursue hyper-growth in headcount, instead focusing on controlled hiring and sustainable burn management while continuously investing strategically in revenue growth," Song said. "We have observed that funding has remained strong for companies like EliseAI that effectively address enduring enterprise challenges such as operational efficiency, particularly in foundational markets like housing, which are always in demand." With another successful funding round under its belt, EliseAI, which employs around 150 full-time employees out of its NYC offices, plans to further expand into a rather unexpected market: healthcare. Song thinks that much of the company's tech stack can be adapted to serve health clinics' administrative needs, like appointment scheduling and billing and payments. Indeed, EliseAI launched a healthcare solution in 2023 called HealthAI, and Song says that several providers are already using it. It's a crowded market, though; EliseAI will have to compete against startups like Hyro, which similarly use AI to handle text and voice conversations between healthcare organizations and their patients. Sapphire Ventures led the round with participation from Point72 Private Investments, Divco West, Navitas Capital and Koch Real Estate Investments. Bringing EliseAI's total raised to $140 million, the new capital will be put toward hiring, AI R&D, product development and supporting EliseAI's go-to-market efforts, Song said. "Our primary focus was bringing in an excellent partner for the business; that is why we chose Sapphire," Song added. Sapphire partner Cathy Gao will be joining EliseAI's board of directors. "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 leveraging AI to its potential," Gao said in a statement. "I believe the company is well-positioned to lead the charge in housing and deliver similar results in new verticals like healthcare."

Check out the pitch deck AI startup EliseAI used to raise $75 million in Series D funding

This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. Have an account? Log in. Song told BI that she cofounded the company because the housing sector "suffers from inefficient technology, and this cost is absorbed by us consumers." EliseAI has also expanded to serve healthcare providers by automating non-clinical tasks such as scheduling patient appointments and handling billing and payments. On the housing front, the startup makes money by charging based on the size of someone's portfolio and the products that they purchase, Song said. "We have a leasing AI, a resident AI, and we charge per building," she added. Song said that, in healthcare, its AI agent largely automates calls and charges either per call or per provider. The Series D was led by Sapphire Ventures, with participation from existing investors Navitas Capital, Point72 Private Investments, Divco West, and Koch Real Estate Investments. Song said the company would use the fresh funding to grow its head count -- bolstering its engineering talent -- and invest in product development.