He spent his career teaching machines to think. Then he built one whose whole job is to make people sound more human.
Everybody else in proptech raced to remove the human from the leasing office. Nick Deveau ran the other way. His company, Grotto AI, does not answer the phone for the apartment agent or fire off the follow-up text on her behalf. It sits in the room with her, listens, and tells her - quietly, in the moment - exactly how the best agent in the company would have handled the next sixty seconds.
The premise is almost rude in its simplicity. Software has spent a decade trying to replace salespeople. Deveau looked at the same problem and decided the salesperson was the asset, not the bug. "AI today is not good at persuasion," he says. "It's not good at selling." So he built a product that points the machine at everything around the human conversation, and leaves the conversation itself to the person.
Role: Co-Founder & CEO, Grotto AI
Based: New York, NY
Training: Graduate AI, Stanford
Last act: Core tech behind EvolutionIQ's $730M sale
This act: $10M seed, led by ICONIQ Capital
"Our purpose is to help humans shine in the moments that matter most."
- Nick Deveau, Grotto AIDeveau will tell you himself that he is an outsider to real estate. "My background isn't originally from the real estate world," he says. "It is from the data, machine learning and AI world." For years he built vertical AI products for Fortune 500 companies across insurance, healthcare and hiring - the unglamorous, heavily regulated corners where AI has to actually work or someone gets sued.
The defining chapter was EvolutionIQ, where Deveau co-led the development of core technology used across regulated insurance industries. That work helped drive the company's $730 million acquisition in late 2024, one of the first big exits for the vertical AI SaaS thesis. His co-founder, Ben Epstein - now Grotto's CTO - was beside him for it, building the proprietary language-model platform underneath.
When two engineers who just lived through a nine-figure exit go looking for their next problem, you would expect them to pick something close to home. Instead they picked apartment leasing - a business of phone calls, walk-throughs, and the soft art of getting a stranger to sign a year of their life away. The gap they saw was not a technology gap. It was a coaching gap.
Top leasing agents convert prospects at roughly ten times the rate of average ones. Every operator knows this. Almost none of them can explain why, let alone teach it. The knowledge lives in a handful of people and walks out the door when they quit. Grotto's wager is that this knowledge is recoverable - that if you listen to enough calls and tours, the difference between great and average stops being a mystery and becomes a pattern you can hand to everyone.
When Grotto's platform started parsing real leasing conversations, the findings read less like a software changelog and more like advice from a very good maitre d'. The agents who created a moment of laughter on a tour converted markedly better. So did the ones who led with genuine curiosity instead of a feature list.
It is the kind of insight that sounds obvious right up until you try to make it repeatable across a thousand agents. That is the whole product.
Grotto's platform analyzes real leasing calls and tours, mapping which behaviors actually move a prospect toward a signed lease - and which just fill the silence.
By studying top performers, the system turns their instinct into a teachable playbook - the curiosity, the timing, the moment of warmth that average agents skip.
Then it delivers that playbook back to every agent in real time, across calls, tours and follow-ups. The north star, in Deveau's words: reducing vacancy loss.
"Focus on driving bottom-line impact for your customers. That always wins."
- Nick DeveauThe $10M seed was led by ICONIQ Capital - the same firm that co-led Anthropic's $30 billion Series G - with Asymmetric Capital Partners alongside. For ICONIQ, it was one of its earliest-stage checks ever.
Angel and advisor names include Avi Dorfman, co-founder of Compass; Caren Maio of Funnel Leasing; and David Dear, formerly of Bilt Rewards and Equity Residential. Ex-Procore CRO Dennis Lyandres advises on go-to-market.
Grotto's platform is in use with major operators including Weidner Apartment Homes, which manages more than 70,000 units - the kind of scale where a few points of conversion is real money.
Deveau's co-founder built EvolutionIQ's LLM platform and runs MLOps Community chapters with 25,000-plus members. Between them: nearly two decades of building machine-learning products that ship.
Empty apartments quietly drain something like $500 billion in property value. Deveau's aim is to plug that leak not by automating people out of the leasing office, but by making every agent perform like the best one in the building. The thesis underneath it all is almost old-fashioned: in housing, when it matters most, humans still beat bots.