The money had a job, apparently. It was going to sit there. A renter would hand over a security deposit, move into an apartment and get on with life while the cash remained behind, waiting for something to go wrong. Paraag Sarva had spent enough time around rental buildings to know the ritual. Eventually, he helped build a company around the question of whether all that waiting required quite so much money.
The beginning was smaller than the eventual pitch. In the summer of 2016, Sarva, Benjamin Lantos and Bryan Woods worked on Rhino during nights and weekends. Sarva met landlords around New York. Lantos worked through the insurance. Woods wrote the software. Ten years later, Woods remembered the email from Sarva that had set things going: could a deposit work more like a recurring subscription payment?
A subscription is an inviting comparison. Anyone who has ever cancelled one knows that the details still deserve reading. Rhino’s proposition would put those details at the center of a housing business: less cash required at the beginning, a fee for the alternative, and a continuing obligation to pay for damage or unpaid rent. The old arrangement was familiar. The new one had to be explained.
A New York education, with several changes of address
Sarva grew up in Queens and attended New York University. His early working life took him to Goldman Sachs around 2004 and 2005. Technology entrepreneurship was not the original plan. Finance offered a recognizable first step, and he took it. His education included bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics, a useful foundation for a career that would repeatedly return to the movement, availability and occasional immobility of money.
Then came City Hall, where he worked as a policy adviser and aide in Michael Bloomberg’s administration. Before selling a product to property owners, he had worked inside the machinery of municipal government. That matters in a housing story. A lease may look like a private agreement between two parties, but the rules surrounding it have an impressive number of public authors.
He also worked at HowAboutWe, a dating startup. Dating and deposit management make an unlikely pair on a résumé, although both involve people trying to improve their living arrangements. His professional path was already crossing institutions that tend to speak different languages: banks, government offices, startups and property businesses. Rhino would eventually require conversations with all of them.
Property was close to home. His father arrived from India in 1972 and built an accounting practice that expanded into investment advice and real estate. Sarva later took responsibility for a portfolio of roughly 200 apartments. Even his own search for a two-bedroom turned into a 4,000-square-foot Brooklyn redevelopment. A modest housing requirement had acquired a rather elaborate answer.
Before Rhino, he led a property management and development business with more than $100 million in assets. Managing property meant seeing the transaction from the owner’s side as well as the renter’s. A deposit provides security. Collecting, holding and eventually resolving it also creates work. The opportunity lay in finding an arrangement each side would accept, with the owner’s protection still intact.
The price of leaving cash alone
Rhino launched in 2017. Its deposit alternative allowed eligible renters at participating properties to pay premiums instead of placing the full cash deposit with a landlord. The property owner received protection for covered losses. The renter kept more money available at move-in. For a business built around insurance, the immediate attraction was the very ordinary pleasure of having cash in your own account.
The distinction between having money and having access to it is easy to miss until the moving truck arrives. A deposit can be refundable and still be inconvenient. Refundability describes what may happen later. A moving bill wants attention now. Sarva’s business addressed the gap between those two dates, turning the timing of a rental expense into something a customer could choose.
Pay upfront → money held → eligible balance returned
Pay premiums → retain upfront cash → repay approved claims
That choice has a price. Premium payments are nonrefundable, and they do not build up a deposit balance for the renter. If a landlord submits a covered claim and Rhino approves and pays it, the renter remains responsible for reimbursing the approved amount. Insurance in this arrangement protects the property owner. The renter purchases a different way to satisfy the deposit requirement.
This is where a tidy startup pitch becomes a real consumer decision. Cash kept available has value; fees paid over time have a cost. A person who can comfortably fund a refundable deposit may weigh the arrangement differently from someone whose savings would otherwise disappear at the lease signing. The comparison needs both the beginning of the tenancy and its eventual end.
Sarva’s case for changing deposits also reached policymakers. Written testimony bearing his name went before New York City’s housing committee in June 2019. It argued that upfront rental costs restricted mobility and tied up money tenants could use elsewhere. Housing affordability was usually discussed through rent levels. Here was an entrepreneur asking officials to look at the cost of getting through the door.
The approach placed Rhino at the junction of product development and public advocacy. A landlord had to accept the alternative. A renter had to understand it. Local rules could shape the available choices. Software could make enrollment easier, but software alone could not settle all three conversations. Sarva’s earlier time in government had acquired a practical second use.
The round, and the reckoning
In January 2021, Rhino raised $95 million in a round led by Tiger Global. Its valuation reached roughly $500 million. These were the figures that travelled easily: large, round and fit for a headline. They described investor expectations at a particular moment. The everyday operating question remained whether enough property owners and renters would choose the product, and whether the business could serve them economically.
In his own account of the raise, Sarva said Rhino had partnerships in 46 states and was available in more than a million homes. That distribution mattered: a renter’s ability to select Rhino depended on the property offering it. Expansion meant building relationships with owners and managers, as well as attracting renters. The business had to earn a place in somebody else’s leasing process.
The following year brought a different kind of announcement. In February 2022, Rhino laid off 57 employees, more than a fifth of its staff. The company said the restructuring would accelerate profitability and reduce reliance on capital markets during a volatile period. For Sarva, the founding CEO, the story now included the cost of changing the operating plan after a period of funded expansion.
A profile that stops at the valuation leaves out this part of the job. Hiring and fundraising create commitments; a change in the plan reaches the people who joined to carry it out. Rhino’s growth ambitions and its restructuring belong on the same page. Together they show the distance between financing an idea and sustaining the organization built to deliver it.
By February 2023, Rhino was broadening the product. Following its acquisition of Deposify, it launched Rhino+, bringing cash deposit management and the insurance alternative into one digital process. A company associated with replacing deposits was also building tools for handling them. The practical problem had grown from offering another option to managing a set of options without making leasing more cumbersome.
In May 2023, Sarva passed CEO duties to Lantos and announced another $30 million in financing. At the handoff, he said Rhino’s partner network covered six million US rental homes and that renters had avoided more than $1 billion in upfront move-in costs. Availability across homes and actual renter use are different measures. So are upfront costs avoided and lifetime savings after fees.
A different kind of coaching
After the handoff, Sarva wrote about management. One December 2023 essay argued that colleagues should bring considered views to decisions while remaining willing to revise them. A silent room could indicate a culture that discouraged participation, or simply the wrong people in the meeting. He wanted the CEO to examine both possibilities. Agreement, after all, is very easy to obtain from people who never speak.
“Stubborn for the sake of stubborn is bad and wastes both time and money.”
Paraag Sarva, December 2023
He also hosted On the Horn with Paraag Sarva, a podcast about leadership, technology and building companies. The interest extended beyond his own product category. The recurring subject was how people organize work and make choices when the answers are still being assembled. Having once been responsible for the whole company, he was spending more time examining how that responsibility gets exercised.
In January 2025, he described launching Hilltop the previous year with William Lucas and Joe Manganelli. The practice offered coaching and advice to venture-backed CEOs. His account included a change in his own attitude: he had once believed he could manage without coaching, then tried it, then began helping other leaders himself. Experience was becoming something he could bring into another person’s working week.
Outside that work, there are pleasingly specific details. He enjoys cooking and has belonged to an ice cream club where making the ice cream was the rule. He has coached school basketball. The club, at least, presents a straightforward governance model: arriving with enthusiasm and an empty bowl will not quite do. Participation requires producing something everyone else can judge.
Rhino began with a familiar transaction and an impatient question about the money inside it. Sarva’s later work turns toward the person making the decisions. A founder can raise money, hire people and carry a title while still needing help thinking through the next choice. After years of working on the deposit at the door, he has made room for the conversation on the other side.