Fifteen dog walkers arriving at one apartment community is a perfectly ordinary sight, provided you are a dog. Ben Johnson saw a scheduling problem. He was working long hours as an investment banker in Houston, had acquired a puppy, and needed someone to take it out. Around him, other residents were solving the same problem separately, paying for individual visits to the same address.
Johnson tried the obvious remedy: talk to the neighbors. He went to the dog park with a proposal to combine their buying power and use one walker. The reception was poor. In his later telling, just one person listened. A promising efficiency argument had encountered the formidable institution of other people having their own preferences.
He kept working on the problem. The apartment manager offered a different route to organizing services across a building. That change in whom he approached became central to Spruce. Years later, the founder would turn his attention to construction, where another crowd of people was spending too much time coordinating work. The dogs had supplied an early example of a recurring irritation.
A banker builds a bridge
Before Spruce, Johnson worked at ING Capital in corporate and investment banking. His education took him through the University of Texas at Austin and an MBA with honors at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. The work involved financing transactions across multiple regions. He had experience with businesses whose operations and capital requirements had to be understood together.
His move into entrepreneurship came in stages. By the time he resigned from banking, Spruce had seven apartment communities signed up and four employees. Sales calls had begun to intrude on the working day. An agreement with a substantial apartment operator helped force the decision. There was already a business demanding his attention when he chose to give it all of his attention.
His advice afterward was to build a bridge into the next career. That is a useful correction to the romance of the sudden resignation. Seven customers and four colleagues give a decision a different weight. They also make the next morning rather less theoretical.
The building becomes the customer channel
Spruce launched in April 2016, initially operating under the name Apartment Butler. The service menu eventually included housekeeping, laundry, pet care and smaller chores. A resident could book help with something as modest as the dishes. An apartment building contained enough separate households to make these small requests interesting as a group.
By November 2020, Spruce had announced an $8 million Series A led by Mercury Fund, with Sweat Equity Partners participating. It had grown from just under 100,000 apartment units at the beginning of that year to 230,000. More than 760 properties were on the platform. Those were units within its reach, rather than a count of households purchasing a service.
The distinction helps explain Johnson’s business. A relationship with an apartment operator opened a distribution channel to residents; residents still chose whether to book. The address was doing some of the organizing that his dog-park conversations had failed to accomplish. A building could bring demand together without requiring every neighbor to attend the same meeting.
Chicago, then a change of chair
In 2021, Spruce bought The Minte, a Chicago business offering hotel-style apartment cleaning. The acquisition brought Spruce into Chicago and joined two companies pursuing closely related household routines. Its geography was expanding, and the service was becoming a business that had to operate across cities with different property partners and local providers.
HousingWire named Johnson a Rising Star in 2022. The recognition emphasized both the apartment business and the opportunity for local service companies to organize their work more efficiently. The award captured the two audiences he was trying to serve: people who wanted help at home and businesses that needed a workable way to deliver it.
July 2022 brought a $26 million Series B led by Sweat Equity Partners and a leadership change. Steven Pho, already a director, became CEO; Johnson became president. Pho’s background included Favor Delivery and RetailMeNot. For Johnson, the company he had started had reached a stage with another executive in its chief executive chair.
One million doors, many local businesses
On March 23, 2023, Spruce announced that its services were available in more than one million apartment units. The footprint covered over 3,500 communities in 20 US markets. Seattle had joined that January. The company said it worked with more than 450 cleaning professionals nationwide.
These are figures about availability and operating reach. They describe the distance traveled from a few communities in Houston, while leaving the individual booking at the center of the transaction. Someone still had to enter an apartment and do the work. The software could arrange the visit; it could hardly wash a plate by admiring the size of its market.
The role of local service businesses remained a recurring theme in Johnson’s conversations about Spruce. In a September 2022 podcast, he discussed why working with those companies had proved more successful than relying on gig workers. Logistics had become a central subject: how work moved through the system mattered alongside how customers found it.
The founder who enjoys an argument
Johnson describes himself as an extrovert who thinks aloud. His approach to ideas begins with talking about them, then working backward from the desired result to the first action. He has also acknowledged the limitations of his own directness. “Sometimes, head-on is not the best way to approach a problem.” It is a fitting admission from someone whose opening customer research involved trying to organize a dog park.
There are smaller details behind the executive titles. In his 2021 account of a working day, he made morning coffee for himself and his partner, kept a to-do list in a Google Doc and used Calendly to spare himself scheduling exchanges. He enjoyed Hearthstone. The tools were familiar; the coffee received rather more personal enthusiasm.
His explanation of the founder’s job also included selling the company repeatedly: to customers, prospective employees, properties and investors. Each audience needed its own reason to believe. The original difficulty of persuading people had never disappeared. The conversations had simply become more numerous and the consequences larger.
Seven apartment communities.
Four employees.
Then the resignation.The bridge from banking to Spruce
A second complaint, closer to home
The idea for Scaffold began with another person describing an everyday inconvenience. Johnson’s mother worked for an electrical contractor. She told him that her job required specialized knowledge, yet much of her time went to repetitive administration. Her estimate put the work requiring that expertise at a tenth of the total.
The construction problem had a particularly awkward shape. Trade contractors worked with multiple homebuilders, each using different portals and conventions. A schedule, scope change or purchase order might need to be read in one place and entered somewhere else. Differences could persist even between divisions of the same builder. The person at the keyboard became the connection between systems.
Johnson co-founded Scaffold with Robert Eanes in 2024. Eanes had previously co-founded Pingboard. Their respective experience brought together field-service operations and the management of data across separate software systems. Neither founder had built houses. They approached the industry through the coordination work surrounding the crews who did.
What comes after the booking
Johnson’s Spruce experience carried over to his next company: scheduling and dispatching crews, building operating systems for field workers and integrating with property-management platforms. The new setting involved builders, trade contractors and suppliers. Purchase orders and schedule changes were an initial focus, with information translated into a common format.
The resemblance between the businesses is useful without making them identical. Spruce brought services to residents through apartment communities. Scaffold connects information used by companies constructing homes. In both cases, a worker’s productive day depends partly on decisions made elsewhere. An update that arrives late can undo a perfectly sensible plan.
Johnson has also co-founded Texas Game Exchange with Erik Neunhoffer, an auction platform rooted in ranching and livestock. Gatby has welcomed him as an adviser as well. These connections widen the picture of his work beyond a single apartment-services company, while Scaffold now supplies his chief executive role.
A microphone and a construction schedule
At the Housing Innovation Summit in Charlotte in May 2026, Scaffold competed at Pitchfest and received a $100,000 investment award from Home Technology Ventures. Johnson stood onstage beside a slide describing the company’s data layer for trades, suppliers and builders. The subject was administrative coordination, presented to an industry that could attach a cost to a wasted site visit.
The award brought an investment and another opportunity to explain the problem in public. Competitors included companies working on robotics, regulation and building products. Johnson’s proposition concerned the instructions and records moving between the businesses already involved in a house.
There is a pleasingly practical continuity here. The early apartment idea concerned too many separate journeys to the same place. The construction company concerns journeys made with information that may already be wrong. Travel, timing and the work waiting at the destination keep turning up in his business life.
The next house on the schedule
On September 15, 2026, Scaffold announced a $15 million seed round led by Navitas Capital. Its investors included D.R. Horton, Pulte Homes, Builders FirstSource and other participants across the housing industry. The company said its platform had been deployed on more than 200,000 homes across 30 states. Funding would support a larger engineering team and broader coverage of industry systems.
“Every hour spent reconciling them by hand adds nothing to a house,” Johnson said of the disconnected applications. It is a compact expression of his current ambition. Administrative effort has a cost even when everyone has become accustomed to performing it.
The failed dog-park pitch remains a useful beginning for this story because it contains an actual setback. His neighbors did not rally to the proposal. Johnson found another route, built a business and eventually moved into a different industry. Today, his attention rests on the purchase order, the changed schedule and the crew heading to its next job. There is plenty there to keep an impatient organizer occupied.
September 2026
reported deployment