A leasing agent walks a stranger through an empty apartment, five times a day, hoping this is the one who signs. Grotto AI is the quiet voice in the software suggesting the next question to ask.
There is a number people in multifamily real estate cite the way climate scientists cite parts-per-million: $500 billion. That is roughly the property value erased industry-wide by vacancy - apartments sitting empty, rent that never gets collected, revenue that simply does not happen.
Most of the last decade of proptech tried to fix this by automating the boring parts - scheduling, screening, follow-up texts. Grotto AI, a twelve-person startup out of New York, looked at hundreds of thousands of real leasing calls and tours and found something less automatable: the deciding factor was often not the floor plan or the price. It was whether the agent asked a genuinely curious question, or got the prospect to laugh.
So the company built a product that does not replace the leasing agent. It coaches them, live, mid-call and mid-tour, nudging toward the behaviors its data says convert - at that specific property, for that specific prospect.
Grotto's research, drawn from analysis of leasing interactions, found that soft skills moved the needle more than most operators assumed.
Figures as reported by Grotto AI and its investors; percentages reflect relative lift, not shares of a common total.
Nick Deveau and Ben Epstein met at EvolutionIQ, where they led development of the core AI technology behind that company's $730 million acquisition in 2024. Their backgrounds span hiring, healthcare, and insurance - regulated, human-heavy industries where AI has to earn trust one interaction at a time.
Entered real estate after learning that vacancy losses cost the industry roughly $500 billion in property value. Says the goal isn't replacing agents, but "doubling down on humans in the moments that matter most."
Nearly two decades building and scaling AI solutions with Deveau, focused on making complex guidance systems feel simple enough for frontline, non-technical teams to trust immediately.
Real-time prompts delivered to leasing agents mid-call - what to ask, how to handle an objection, when to push for the tour booking.
Self-serve prep before a prospect tour, plus structured feedback after it, reinforcing whatever behaviors are actually working at that property.
The analytics layer underneath both products - it identifies the specific revenue drivers for each property, rather than applying one generic script everywhere.
Grotto AI closed a $10 million seed round in February 2026, led by ICONIQ Capital - the same firm that had just co-led Anthropic's $30 billion Series G. Multifamily-focused Asymmetric Capital Partners participated, alongside angel investors David Dear (BILT, formerly Equity Residential), Caren Maio (Funnel Leasing), and Avi Dorfman (Compass).
Grotto, Inc. founded by Nick Deveau and Ben Epstein in New York.
Announces $10M seed round led by ICONIQ Capital, one of the firm's earliest-stage investments to date.
Profiled by Commercial Observer and AlleyWatch; Weidner Apartment Homes deployment across 70,000+ units highlighted as flagship case study.
Grotto is SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27701 certified, and built to stay Fair Housing compliant - a non-trivial requirement for anything coaching what a leasing agent says.
The company charges per property, per month - a subscription model, not a per-seat or usage fee.
Deveau and Epstein's prior company, EvolutionIQ, sold for $730 million in 2024 - a data point investors clearly noticed.
Grotto's research base draws on hundreds of thousands of real leasing conversations, not a lab simulation.