A New York real estate kid who studied Fine Arts, redesigned apps for Sequoia, and then went back to fix the thing that's been breaking property managers since forever: the books.
Property management runs on paperwork. Leases, bank reconciliations, owner statements, security deposits, vendor invoices - the administrative surface area of even a modest portfolio is staggering. Most property managers patch the gap with an in-house accountant, or two, or five. Mark Rojas looked at that arrangement and decided it was a 1990s answer to a 2020s problem.
Rojas grew up watching New York real estate move from the inside. By the time he landed at the University of Southern California to study Political Science and Fine Arts, he'd absorbed enough about the industry's friction to last a career. The Fine Arts degree wasn't a detour - it became a compass. Everything Rojas has built since carries the mark of someone who thinks visually before he thinks structurally.
His path into tech came through a phone call from Sequoia Capital. Shopular, a mobile coupon app the firm had backed, needed a designer. Rojas went in for what was framed as a one-month engagement and left with a full-time offer after delivering a complete redesign of the app. Shopular was later acquired by Ebates. Rojas filed it as a useful lesson in what happens when design is treated as a lever rather than a checkbox.
It's more fun to be a pirate than to join the Navy.- Mark Rojas, on his Twitter bio - and, apparently, his career philosophy
In 2015, Rojas co-founded Heremeow, an augmented reality social platform. AR wasn't mainstream yet - Snapchat's lens studio wouldn't launch for another year - and Heremeow didn't survive its era. But it planted something: a belief that technology could be layered onto the physical world in ways that change how people relate to it. He filed that away too.
Proper AI was founded in May 2017. The pitch was straightforward: property managers should not have to employ a full accounting department. They should be able to offload that work to a team of specialists, backed by purpose-built software, at a fraction of the cost. "Your accounting team, powered by AI and built for property management" is how the company describes it now. In 2017, it was a sharper sell - less AI jargon, more honest about the labor model. What Rojas built wasn't software pretending to be humans. It was humans, made dramatically more efficient by software.
The integration list tells the story of the strategy. Proper AI works with Appfolio, Buildium, Entrata, MRI, Netsuite - the property management platforms that already run the industry. Rojas didn't try to replace the incumbents. He slipped underneath them, providing the accounting layer those platforms couldn't deliver on their own. A client keeps their existing software. They swap out their accounting team.
Proper AI's model consistently undercuts the cost of employing a dedicated in-house property accounting team.
From mid-size operators to enterprise-scale portfolios - Proper scales with the business, not against it.
August 2020 was the public arrival. MetaProp led a $4.8 million seed round, and HousingWire headlined it the "Uber of property accounting." The comparison was reductive but sticky - it got the point across that a centralized, on-demand service could displace a distributed, in-house one. Rojas didn't argue with the framing. He raised another round.
July 2021 brought a $9 million Series A led by QED Investors, with MetaProp, Expa, and Bling Capital joining. QED's portfolio includes Credit Karma, Nubank, and Avant - firms that rebuilt their sectors by treating financial services as a distribution problem rather than a product problem. Rojas was walking into that tradition deliberately. Property accounting wasn't broken because no one was smart enough to fix it. It was broken because no one had structured the delivery model correctly.
By 2024, Proper AI had crossed $37 million in annual revenue, grown to 320 employees, and closed a Series B. The company now handles portfolios covering millions of commercial square feet alongside its residential and multifamily clients. The sweet spot remains 500 to 2,000 units - large enough to justify the infrastructure, complex enough that in-house accounting starts failing - but the ceiling keeps rising.
Rojas maintains a personal website where he describes himself as a "Designer, Musician, Creative." The musician part doesn't surface often in interviews. Neither does the designer credential, these days - you don't hear many property management CEOs leading with their Dribbble portfolio. But both show up in the way Proper AI is constructed: the clean integration strategy, the focused positioning, the resistance to feature sprawl. Rojas built a company that does one thing at a sufficient scale to matter, then scaled it.
Property managers running 500 units are, almost by definition, too large to stay informal and too small to hire a full finance team. Rojas found that band and stayed there. Everything else - the AI layer, the software integrations, the dedicated onboarding - is scaffolding around the core offer: someone else handles your books, accurately, and costs you less than hiring the same competency in-house.
What makes Proper AI interesting isn't the technology stack. It's the service model. The AI doesn't replace the accountants - it makes them faster. Rojas built a hybrid that neither pure-software nor pure-services companies could replicate easily: software firms don't want the liability of managing books; accounting firms don't want the development cost of building property-specific tooling. Proper AI sits in the gap.
QED Investors - backers of Credit Karma, Nubank, and Avant - look for teams that treat financial services as a distribution problem. Rojas had re-engineered the delivery model for property accounting, not just the software. That's a QED-style bet.
Proper AI consistently delivers accounting services at ~30% below the cost of equivalent in-house hires. At 500+ units, the math makes the decision easy. Rojas built the model around that price point and held it.
Rojas explains Proper AI's approach to property management accounting - why the in-house model is broken, how AI and human expertise work together, and what property managers gain when they outsource their books.
Watch on YouTube →Rojas's personal website describes him as a "Designer, Musician, Creative." He runs a 320-person company and still leads with the musician credential.
His Twitter bio quotes a line attributed to Steve Jobs: "It's more fun to be a pirate than to join the Navy." His career trajectory suggests he took it literally.
Before AR was mainstream, Rojas built an AR social app called Heremeow in 2015 - the same year most people were still figuring out Snapchat filters.
He studied Fine Arts alongside Political Science at USC - an unusual pairing that shows up in Proper AI's clean positioning and resistance to feature sprawl.
Grew up in New York's real estate world. Didn't build a real estate startup until his third company. Sometimes the clearest view comes from distance.
A one-month Sequoia design contract turned into a full-time job. Rojas delivered a complete app redesign for Shopular before anyone asked him to stay.
Property managers over 250 units generate enough accounting work to require a dedicated hire or small team. Those hires are expensive, hard to retain, and create a single point of failure. When your bookkeeper leaves, your books fall behind.
Proper AI provides a dedicated accounting team - real people, backed by AI tools - for a monthly fee tied to unit count or square footage. The team integrates with whatever property management software the client already uses.
~30% lower accounting costs. No recruiting, no turnover, no software switching. Month-to-month pricing. Coverage across residential, commercial, HOA, short-term rental, and co-op asset classes.