Colton Pace

The founder who decided property taxes should be fair

For most people, a property tax bill lands in the mailbox and gets paid. The number is assumed to be right. Colton Pace spent the early part of his career learning that the wealthiest property owners in America assume the exact opposite, and that the gap between those two habits is worth a great deal of money.

Pace is the co-founder and chief executive of Ownwell, an Austin-based company that reviews property tax assessments, finds the ones that are too high, and appeals them on the owner's behalf. The pitch is simple. If your home is over-assessed, you are overpaying, and Ownwell handles the paperwork, deadlines and hearings to fix it. Customers pay only when the company wins, through a contingency fee that runs between 25 and 35 percent of the savings.

Behind that simple pitch is a career that gave Pace an unusual vantage point. Before Ownwell, he worked as an investor and asset manager, including a stretch at Vulcan Capital, the investment arm tied to Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. In those roles he helped oversee billions of dollars across asset classes from venture capital to real estate, and he was an early backer of companies including Redfin, Uber and Spotify.

That contrast became the founding idea. The largest owners had teams of experts squeezing every inefficiency out of their portfolios. Ordinary homeowners had nothing comparable, even though the property tax appeal process was, in theory, open to them. The difference was access, time and expertise, and Pace decided software could close it.

From classroom to company

Pace earned his MBA at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, and it was on campus that the company took shape. He met Joseph Noor, a computer science PhD student who would become Ownwell's chief technology officer. The two co-founded the company in 2020 and launched to customers in 2021, starting with the property tax appeal process in Texas before expanding outward.

The engine underneath is data. Ownwell's technology automates the complex steps of an appeal and analyzes millions of local property records to build the strongest possible case to bring to a local municipality. Every appeal the company files makes the next one smarter, a flywheel that now spans more than a million filed appeals.

A market almost nobody uses

Pace describes the opportunity in front of Ownwell as greenfield, and the numbers back him up. By his account, fewer than 10 percent of American homeowners have ever filed a property tax appeal. Most do not know they can, or assume the process is not worth the time. That leaves an enormous share of the market untouched, which is unusual for a category as old and universal as property taxes.

The company has grown into that space quickly. Ownwell now operates in roughly a dozen states, including Texas, New York, Florida, California, Illinois, Georgia, Washington, Maryland, Colorado, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Michigan. In Texas alone it has served hundreds of thousands of first-time appeal customers. The company reports annual growth above 100 percent and, notably for a venture-backed startup, says it is profitable.

In February 2026, Ownwell announced a $50 million financing package to fund its next chapter, including a national property tax appeal offering. The deal combined a $30 million Series B equity round, co-led by Alpha Edison and Mercato Partners, with $20 million in debt from Western Alliance Bank. Earlier investors including Intuit Ventures, Left Lane Capital, First Round Capital, Long Journey Ventures, Proof Fund and Wonder Ventures joined in. The round brought total equity raised to roughly $74 million.

Human in the loop

For a company built on data and automation, Pace is deliberate about where the machines stop. Ownwell uses proprietary AI trained on its million-plus appeals, but Pace insists that people stay involved in every interaction that touches a government entity or a customer's personal information.

That stance reflects the reality of the business. Property tax appeals are argued in front of local officials, governed by local rules, and decided case by case. Software can find the strongest argument and file the paperwork, but a person still needs to stand behind it. Pace has framed automation as a way to scale expertise, not to remove the expert.

What comes next

Property taxes are the entry point, not the endgame. Pace has talked about expanding Ownwell into other recurring costs of owning real estate, including insurance comparisons, mortgage and refinancing options, and utility bill assistance, along with services aimed at small and medium businesses. The company has already built partnerships with names like Realtor.com, Valon Technologies and Amplify Credit Union to widen its reach.

The through-line is the mission Pace repeats in nearly every interview: to democratize access to the tools and resources real estate experts use to build wealth and financial freedom. It is a founding story that starts with watching the very rich optimize everything they own, and ends with a bet that everyone else deserves the same. Outside of work, according to Ownwell's own team page, Pace keeps it simple, with a stated fondness for water-based activities.

For a company whose entire premise is that people are quietly overpaying, the scale of the savings so far, more than $400 million and counting, is the clearest argument that Pace found a real gap. The next test is whether Ownwell can take the same idea national, and then extend it to every other line item on a homeowner's ledger.