The man asking why renting still feels like 1995
Pull up Rentberry today and the first thing you meet is not a listing - it is an AI agent that wants to do the talking, the screening, the lease and the rent collection on your behalf. That is the version of the company Oleksiy Lubinsky is selling now: a fully automated, paperless rental machine pitched at a $13 trillion industry, live in roughly 90 countries, with New York, Los Angeles, London, Berlin and Sydney doing the heaviest lifting.
Lubinsky - who answers to both Oleksiy and Alex - co-founded Rentberry in 2015 and has been its CEO ever since. The premise has barely moved in a decade, even as the wrapping changed from "transparent custom offers" to "blockchain" to "AI real estate agent." Strip the buzzwords and you get one stubborn question he has asked in interview after interview: when you rent a place, why do you hand an agent an entire month's rent? For what, exactly?
It is a founder's question disguised as a renter's complaint. Rentberry's answer is an end-to-end flow that swallows every step landlords and tenants used to dread - search, application, the offer itself, e-signed leases, rent payments, maintenance tickets - and removes the human standing in the doorway charging for the privilege.
When you rent something, you have to pay the agent an equivalent of monthly rent. For what? Our task is to remove this friction point and the unnecessary intermediary.
A banker who got bored of other people's deals
Before any of it, there was a spreadsheet life. A Ukrainian native, Lubinsky studied Economics and Business Administration at UC Berkeley, then went into investment banking - overseeing M&A deals, advising corporations and private equity firms, picking up the kind of rolodex that later turned into Rentberry's first investors and lawyers. He has said he visited more than 40 countries on business and pleasure, which is a useful way to notice that renting is annoying in every language.
His first company was not about real estate at all. City Hour was a networking app - think a "LinkedIn for meeting someone today" - built to fix a gap Lubinsky felt LinkedIn left wide open: matching professionals for actual, same-day, in-person meetings. He sold it in 2015. The exit mattered less than the side effect: it was during City Hour, he says, that he and his team felt firsthand how exhausting long-term renting could be.
That irritation became the company. Rentberry launched in roughly 40 US cities and went nationwide by 2017, framing itself as the only platform with a transparent custom-offer system and a 100% paperless rental experience. The early hook was an auction-style model: tenants make custom offers, landlords accept the one they like, and the market - not a back-room handshake - sets the price.
The part that made regulators nervous
Letting renters bid sounds neutral until a city council hears the word "auction." Lubinsky ran into resistance in places like Seattle and Australia, where critics worried open bidding would push rents up. His response was characteristically blunt, and characteristically founder-brained: the objection, he argued, came from a misunderstanding of basic economics, the same reflexive hostility once aimed at Uber and Airbnb before everyone got used to them.
When people lack the knowledge about a technology they tend to freak out.
ICO, crowdfunding, AI - he has surfed every wave
Few proptech founders have ridden as many hype cycles in a row without falling off. In 2018, Rentberry ran one of the more widely covered real estate ICOs, issuing a BERRY token to bankroll a decentralized rental ecosystem and a plan to crowdsource security deposits. When crypto cooled, the narrative migrated to AI - the "AI real estate agent" that fronts the product today. Throughout, the funding strategy stayed unusually populist: alongside venture money, Lubinsky has run serial equity-crowdfunding rounds on Republic, Wefunder and others, letting retail backers buy in. Reported total funding sits around $137M, including a Series A raise.
The capital discipline traces back to a decision he made early and defends without apology: build where the dollar stretches. He moved much of Rentberry's engineering to Ukraine, reasoning plainly that you can do more with the money there than in California. It is the same cost-effectiveness gospel he preaches to other founders - do as much as possible with what you have.
Figures are self-reported by Rentberry and reflected in crowdfunding and press materials; treat them as the company's framing, not audited results.
The quote wall
Both tenants and landlords get really irritated when working with an agent.
We need to be cost-effective and do as much as possible with available resources.
You can do much more with this money in Ukraine than in California.
When people lack the knowledge about a technology they tend to freak out.
Contrarian, frugal, allergic to middlemen
Contrarian by default. If a market accepts an intermediary, he assumes the intermediary is the bug.
Cost-disciplined. The Ukraine engineering bet was a capital-efficiency play years before it was fashionable.
Persistent. ICO, crowdfunding, AI - same mission re-wrapped for whatever decade he's selling into.
Evangelistic. He'd rather argue with a city council about economics than quietly comply.
Globally minded. 40-plus countries taught him renting is broken in roughly the same way everywhere.
Network-native. His banking rolodex became Rentberry's first investors, lawyers and partners.
On the record
Lubinsky has talked through the Rentberry thesis - blockchain, disruption, saving renters money - in a long-form interview with CryptoCanucks.
▶ CryptoCanucks: Exclusive interview with Alex Lubinsky, CEO of Rentberry