Austin Lo Learned the Hard Way That a Virtual Tour Is Only the Front Door

Nothing sharpens an investor's memory like losing money. Before Austin Lo built software for apartment leasing, he studied internet companies from a hedge fund and watched one wager go wrong with impressive consistency: his team kept betting against Shopify. They saw a website builder and a payments business. The market saw an operating system for commerce. That difference - between a visible feature and the system around it - would follow Lo from the trading floor into New York real estate, where he eventually learned the same lesson again with a VR headset.

Lo's career had trained him to respect details. After graduating from Columbia University's engineering school in 2012, he worked in volatility and derivatives trading at Nomura. A decimal in the wrong place could turn a small mistake into a seven-figure one. He later moved to J. Goldman & Co., investing in marketplaces and internet platforms. He learned to model not only what a company sold, but what its customers, competitors and investors believed they were buying.

Then came an apartment search, that durable New York ritual in which optimism is measured in subway transfers and unanswered messages. Lo was looking with his roommate Chris Kostoulas, whom he had originally met when Kostoulas answered a Craigslist listing after Lo's previous roommate moved out. Their schedules did not cooperate with leasing agents' calendars. They texted videos of apartments to each other. By the time they signed, Kostoulas had not seen his own bedroom.

The friendship survived Lo's remote quality control. More importantly, the irritation produced a useful question: why did shopping for a home online feel primitive beside buying almost anything else? Lo understood the e-commerce analogy from his investing years. Kostoulas brought experience in trading and in scaling operations, product and business development at Uber. In 2019, they launched the company that became Peek.

A headset in search of a habit

The first version was called piiq. It let people create a virtual tour quickly and included an Oculus app for viewing spaces in VR. At open houses, the team arrived with headsets. People were curious. Curiosity, alas, is a charming visitor and a terrible tenant. Usage was dismal.

The technology worked. The behavior around it did not. A property manager could send someone a URL or persuade them to put on a headset, but the tour sat apart from the places where renters actually shopped. There was no easy way to embed it into a property website, connect it to a listing service, or learn which room held a prospect's attention. The demo had no dependable route into the daily workflow.

“If interactive 3D tours can save everyone so much time, and it only took 15 minutes to make one with Peek, why aren't people using it?”Austin Lo, on the question that forced the early pivot

The answer emerged from conversations with early adopters. Peek built a custom WordPress integration for its first client, then an integration with an internet listing service using Vimeo's 360-degree viewer. The work was less theatrical than an Oculus headset. It was also useful. The company added website plugins, widgets, analytics, microsites and partner integrations. Traction appeared when the tour stopped behaving like a standalone artifact and began functioning as one connected piece of a leasing journey.

Lo's Shopify mistake now offered a more generous return. A merchant does not value Shopify merely because it can make a web page. The ecosystem handles many of the jobs required to conduct commerce. In Lo's analogy, making a virtual tour was only a small part of bringing an e-commerce experience to renting. The rest involved content management, distribution, software integrations and data. The tour was the storefront window. Peek had to help operate the shop.

The Friday call

A coherent strategy did not produce instant belief. Lo has said that for Peek's first two years, no reputable accelerator accepted the company. He takes some responsibility for not yet knowing how to articulate the story. The market also assumed that 3D virtualization was a small category whose outcome had already been decided by Matterport.

The founders behaved like outsiders because they were outsiders. They sent cold emails and sometimes simply appeared at property-management offices to ask for an audience. Some of Peek's later relationships began with those unceremonious approaches. Lo's advice from the experience is practical: if a product solves a real problem, industry tenure is useful but not compulsory. Persistence can make an introduction where pedigree cannot.

After two years, a notable proptech investor moved Peek through initial meetings and into due diligence. The company had assembled a small subscription base with annual revenue in the low six figures. Lo thought the break had arrived. At the last minute, the investor checked with its limited partners and withdrew, unconvinced that interactive tours would be broadly adopted. The rejection was delivered on a Friday, an efficient way to place a cloud over an entire weekend.

Lo had spent years cultivating the rational calm of a trader and portfolio manager. Founding a company found the limits of it. He has spoken about scribbling a line from Rocky Balboa's famous speech in his notebooks, a private instruction to keep moving after being hit. There is no tidy evidence that the quotation changed the company's fate. It did something smaller and more credible: it helped its founder pick up the pieces.

For Peek's first two years, the market treated 3D tours as a curiosity. Lo kept returning to the larger job: helping a renter choose a home.

People found in unlikely places

Peek's early personnel story is as improvised as its origin. Kostoulas came from Craigslist. Employee number one was his cousin. Another early employee occupied the parking spot beside Lo in a cooperative motorcycle garage. Lo's lesson is to remain in touch with interesting people because the opportunity to work together seldom announces itself at the first meeting.

That serendipity sits beside a deliberate management philosophy. Lo has described Peek as a high-trust culture. The company tries to define the success criteria and boundaries for an initiative, then lets smart people work without micromanagement. It is a trader's respect for parameters translated into an operator's respect for colleagues.

He also brings a photographer's eye to the category. Lo is a lifelong photography enthusiast and a licensed New York real estate salesperson, two interests that helped him see 3D virtualization as more than an impressive rendering. An apartment image is not decoration when someone is deciding where to live. It is evidence. The unit matters more than the generic floor plan because the renter will inhabit the unit, not the diagram.

In May 2025, Peek announced the institutional vote of confidence that had once vanished on a Friday: a $5 million Series A led by Moneta Ventures, with Timber Grove Ventures and existing investors participating. The plan was to expand sales, engineering, customer success and integrations. Peek also added Moneta partner Jeff Olyniec and CREXI co-founder Luke Morris to its board.

The company says operators using its platform have recorded up to 30 percent fewer vacant days and three times more prospect tours than with legacy 3D-tour platforms. Those are company-reported outcomes, not universal promises. Their importance is conceptual as well as commercial. Peek no longer asks customers to admire immersion. It asks them to measure a business result.

From looking online to asking aloud

The interface keeps changing. Peek expanded from unit-level 3D tours into self-guided touring, automated responses, content distribution and renter-behavior analytics. Partnerships with Livly and Apartment List placed its tools inside other parts of the renter journey. In late 2025, the company introduced Discover, which measures whether individual apartment communities appear when people ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity where they should live.

The change from search box to conversation fits Lo's original problem almost too neatly. A renter does not necessarily know a management company's brand. A renter knows the shape of a life: a two-bedroom below a certain rent, a dog allowed, laundry inside, a manageable commute, perhaps windows facing something kinder than brick. AI systems answer from information they can access and reconcile. A beautiful property website can still conceal its most useful details inside scripts that a crawler does not read.

Discover treats the apartment community, not the corporate portfolio, as the unit that matters. It tests the language of renter questions, compares visibility across systems and points to gaps in pricing, neighborhood detail and data consistency. The technology is new; the product instinct is old. Put useful information where a decision is being made.

There is a temptation to tell technology stories as a parade of inventions: headset, browser, automation, artificial intelligence. Lo's more useful story is about continuity. The surface changes, but the renter still wants confidence before making an expensive, intimate decision. The operator still wants a vacant unit occupied sooner. The useful product is the one that shortens the distance between those needs.

Peek began because one roommate did not see his bedroom until moving day. Years later, Lo was still writing about the annoyance of asking about an exact unit and waiting hours or days for a generic reply. His company now uses automated follow-up to deliver a tracked, unit-level tour while the renter's interest is alive. It is not quite the frictionless e-commerce fantasy, and perhaps housing should never feel exactly like ordering soap. A home deserves more thought. It does not deserve more needless waiting.

The founder's advantage here is not prophecy. It is the willingness to revise the object while protecting the question. The Oculus app could disappear. The ambition to make a home easier to understand could remain. A product can change its clothes many times if it remembers where it is going.