Matt Engfer runs Cubby, a New York software company that would like to be the operating system for self-storage. That sentence contains a lot of assumptions. It assumes self-storage is an industry big enough to need an operating system. It is - about $50 billion, with more U.S. locations than McDonald's, Starbucks, Burger King and Chick-fil-A combined. It assumes the industry doesn't already have one. It doesn't, or didn't, or has several bad ones. And it assumes Engfer, a University of Florida grad who spent his twenties in enterprise client success at a commercial real estate software company called VTS, is the person to build it. Goldman Sachs, in January 2026, put $63 million behind that last assumption.
The origin, which involves boxes of art
In 2018, Engfer was working full time at VTS and running an art-sales side hustle on the weekends. The art needed to live somewhere. He rented three self-storage units. To rent them, he had to phone a human being. In 2018 you could book a hotel room in Marrakech with your thumb; Engfer had to talk on the telephone to warehouse a canvas in New Jersey. That gap - the one between how hotel software worked and how storage software worked - is the entire company thesis. "In 2018, even renting a unit online was barely a thing," he later told Fortune.
He and Adam Fleming, an engineer with time at Goldman Sachs and Meta, incorporated Cubby in 2022. The pair did something founders talk about doing and rarely do. Before shipping any product, they took jobs at storage facilities. They handled overlocks - the padlock a facility puts on your unit when you stop paying. They did walkthroughs. They did the maintenance. If you have ever built B2B software you know how much of it is drawn from a vague memory of what customers said in a discovery call. Cubby was drawn from cleaning up units.
The Texas lien auction, which involves mice
One of the industry's rites is the lien auction. When a tenant abandons a unit, the facility auctions its contents to recoup back rent. Engfer went to lien auctions in Texas in 2023 to understand the operational reality. One unit contained valuable artwork, which is the story the ecosystem tells about itself. Another unit contained a live, ongoing mouse-breeding operation, apparently maintained by a tenant who supplied snake owners. This is the story the ecosystem does not tell about itself, and it is closer to how the business actually runs. Any product built for self-storage has to account for the possibility that somewhere on the property, someone is breeding mice for snakes. Cubby's product surface area does not include a mouse module. But its founders now have a mental model that includes one, which is more than most PropTech competitors can say.
Field note
Cubby's founders spent time as facility employees before writing product code. Overlocks, walkthroughs, maintenance. If your CRM was designed by someone who has never re-locked a delinquent unit, you probably know it.
What Cubby actually is
Cubby markets itself as an AI-native platform. Every SaaS company since roughly late 2023 also markets itself as an AI-native platform, so the phrase is worth unpacking. What Cubby means by it is that the same system handles facility management, e-commerce (online rentals), revenue management (dynamic pricing on the units), call routing and grading, and Voice AI answering the calls that used to require a human on the phone. In an industry where operators typically stitch together four or five vendors - one for the website, one for the phone system, one for the management software, one for pricing algorithms - Cubby is trying to be the single pane of glass. It is, in an unfashionable phrase, a full-stack self-storage OS.
Why Goldman wrote the check
The Series A was led by Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, with Third Prime and Bienville continuing on from earlier rounds. Sixty-three million dollars is a lot of money to hand a founder who does not want you to help him drive. In Engfer's telling, that was the point. He said he wanted investors who wouldn't "grab two hands on the steering wheel," but would provide "healthy pressure." Read closely, that's a founder describing the specific psychological arrangement he wanted from his lead. Series A rounds are usually sold as being about growth. This one was also about buying patience.
The math on the industry supports the check. Fifty billion dollars of rents. Fifty-two thousand facilities in the United States alone. A long tail of independent operators who cannot afford in-house software teams and don't want them. Cubby says it has 400-plus operators on the platform managing more than 500,000 units across the U.S. and Canada. Customers include Atomic Storage Group and American Self Storage. If you believe the market is consolidating around a single platform, and you believe Cubby is that platform, you probably write the check.
The hospitality inheritance
Engfer's parents worked in hotels. His mother was at Hyatt; his father worked at Walt Disney World's Swan and Dolphin. He spent high school and college summers taking entry-level jobs at both. Growing up around large hospitality operators shapes how you look at a $50 billion industry with 52,000 storefronts and a phone-based booking flow. You have already watched an industry go through modernization once. You know what "operator experience" means because you have mopped it.
Engfer likes to talk about self-storage as a career on-ramp. "The last place where you can get a job working for $18 an hour as a site manager without graduating from college," he told Fortune, in an argument for the social utility of the industry he sells software into. It is worth taking seriously. A lot of B2B AI in 2026 is being pitched with the explicit or implicit promise of removing those jobs. Engfer's public message is that Cubby's tools should make those jobs better - the calls easier to grade, the pricing decisions easier to make, the overlocks easier to track - rather than eliminate them wholesale.
The VTS years
Between 2015 and 2021, Engfer worked at VTS, a commercial real estate software company, in a sequence of client-success roles: strategic account manager, team lead of enterprise account management, manager of client success, and finally director of client success. Founders who come out of client success functions build differently than founders who come out of engineering functions. They usually build with an unusual amount of respect for onboarding, adoption, and the operator sitting behind the screen. This shows up in Cubby's public messaging, which spends more time on things like "customized onboarding" and "proactive support" than a typical Series A deck. In an industry where the counterparty is a facility owner who has been burned by a bad software rollout before, that empathy is arguably the product.
What VTS taught him
Client success functions live at the seam between what software promises and what operators actually do with it. It is a good place to notice everything the industry needs and no one has built.
Aspirations, and the boring part
The stated goal is the standard operating platform for self-storage in North America. That is a good goal. It is also the kind of goal that requires a decade of unglamorous integration work - payment rails, access-control hardware, legacy migrations from software written in the 1990s. Engfer has signaled he understands that. He signaled it when he and Fleming took shifts at facilities. He signaled it again when he picked a lead investor for the noun "pressure" rather than the noun "help." Cubby's next few years will be about whether 400 operators becomes 4,000, and whether Voice AI answering the phone at 2 a.m. can hold up to a caller who wants to negotiate about mice.
Selected quotes
On the origin
"In 2018, even renting a unit online was barely a thing."
On the product
"We're building the first truly AI-native platform for self-storage from the ground up."
On ambition
"We're positioned to become the standard operating platform for self-storage."
On the industry
"The last place where you can get a job working for $18 an hour as a site manager without graduating from college [and still move up]."
FAQ
Who is Matt Engfer?
Co-founder and CEO of Cubby, a New York-based AI-native operating platform for self-storage facilities.
What did he do before Cubby?
Roughly six years at commercial real estate software company VTS, ending as Director of Client Success in late 2021.
How did the Cubby idea start?
He rented three storage units for an art side hustle and was surprised the rental process still required phone calls.
How much has Cubby raised?
Around $64 million total, including a $63M Series A led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives in January 2026.
Where did he go to school?
The University of Florida - undergraduate in business administration (entrepreneurship and marketing) and a master's in international business.