He spent two decades watching offline industries get a login screen. Now he's giving one to the people who pour the actual foundations.
PropTech - Homebuilder software - YC S23 - ex-Opendoor, ex-Eventbrite
Open the branded app your new-home builder asked you to download - the one that tracks your closing date, your warranty, the photos of your half-framed kitchen. There is a 4-in-10 chance, among the country's 200 biggest builders, that the software underneath belongs to a company Luke Groesbeck co-founded in 2023.
That company is Foundation, and Groesbeck runs it as co-founder and CEO. The pitch is blunt enough to fit on a business card: "Shopify for homebuilders." Foundation takes the new-home shopping, purchase and ownership experience - an industry that still moves on phone calls, spreadsheets and PDFs - and turns it into white-labeled mobile and web apps that buyers actually want to open.
The pace has been the headline. Foundation grew 5x in 2025. Builders running on the platform collectively sold more than 10,000 homes in a year. And the homeowner apps Foundation shipped in under 18 months now power north of 40% of the top-200 builders. For a sector famous for moving slowly, that is a sprint.
Groesbeck's framing for why it's working is almost stubbornly simple. "Winning comes down to two things," he says: "who moves the fastest, and who's closest to their customers." He has built his whole career on that sentence.
Winning comes down to two things: who moves the fastest, and who's closest to their customers.- Luke Groesbeck, on how Foundation outruns a slow industry
Look at the resume and a pattern jumps out before any single job does. Eventbrite put ticketing online. Opendoor put home-selling online. Foundation is putting home-building online. Groesbeck keeps showing up at the exact moment a paper-and-handshake industry is about to become a piece of software.
His housing roots go back further than the tech. While still in college he interned at Lennar, one of the largest homebuilders in the country - a detail that reads like foreshadowing now. He earned a B.A. in Economics from UC Berkeley, then went through Y Combinator as an early founder around 2008, long before the second YC trip with Foundation in 2023.
At Opendoor he led product for the field tools that agents and operations teams lived in, then moved to partnerships - where he helped scale the company's fastest-growing acquisition channels. One of them, the homebuilder partnership channel, became Opendoor's first billion-dollar partner channel. That was the tell. The builders weren't just a channel; they were a customer base hungry for the same digitization Opendoor had brought to resale.
He also did a turn as VP of Product at True Link Financial, rounding out a career that reads as fifteen-plus years of taking complicated, high-stakes purchases and making them feel like an app.
Foundation isn't a solo act. The founding trio - Groesbeck, Derek Schairer and Graham Place - all met at Opendoor. Luke and Derek worked the partnerships team together; Graham was one of the first people on the original version of Opendoor Mortgage. They had already seen, up close, how much builders wanted what Opendoor had built for resale.
Schairer brings a homebuilding pedigree that's hard to fake - he sold homes for Lennar and ran Opendoor's homebuilder business as GM. Between them, the founders pair Silicon Valley product instincts with people who have actually stood in a sales trailer. That combination is the company's whole thesis.
CO-FOUNDER & CEO
Product leader, ex-Opendoor partnerships, ex-Eventbrite. The "move fast, stay close" voice.
CO-FOUNDER
Sold homes for Lennar; GM of Opendoor's homebuilder business. The industry insider.
CO-FOUNDER
Early builder of Opendoor Mortgage. The complex-transactions brain.
The top 300 U.S. builders sell more than $250 billion in homes a year. The country is short somewhere between 2 and 6 million homes. Put those two facts side by side and you get the size of the opening Foundation is walking through: an enormous, essential market that has barely been touched by modern software.
Groesbeck's ambition isn't a better CRM bolt-on. It's the whole buyer journey - first tour, purchase, closing, and the long tail of ownership and warranty - living in one branded experience the builder controls. "We want to build Silicon Valley-grade technology that helps homebuilders sell more homes, more profitably, and deliver a better experience for buyers," he says.
We want to build Silicon Valley-grade technology that helps homebuilders sell more homes, more profitably, and deliver a better experience for buyers.- Luke Groesbeck, on Foundation's mission
For a man building software for an industry obsessed with location, his own says a lot. Groesbeck lives in Boulder, Colorado with two daughters under six. The off-hours are spent outside - hiking, rock climbing, snowboarding, skiing. He traded the Silicon Valley commute for trailheads, and runs a venture-backed company from the front range of the Rockies.
He is, by his own listening habits, a macro nerd: a regular on the finance podcast Odd Lots. It fits the founder who frames a homebuilding startup in terms of housing shortages and billion-dollar channels rather than just app screens.