The rental platform that decided the whole lease - search, screening, signing, paying, fixing - belongs in one place.
Ask Rentberry's CEO what renting looks like in a few years and he answers without flinching: an AI does almost all of it. It reads the listing, matches it to what you want, messages the landlord, haggles over the price, books the tour, fills the application, runs the screening, generates the lease, collects the rent, and - after you've moved in - files the maintenance ticket when the dishwasher quits. That is the pitch in 2026, and it is a long way from a website where you click on apartments.
The renting world it is poking at has not changed much in decades. You find a place, you fill out a form, you fill out another form, you pay an application fee, you wait, you sign paper, you write a check. Repeat per apartment. It is a process designed, apparently, by people who enjoyed standing in line at the DMV. Rentberry's entire reason to exist is the suspicion that none of that needs a human at all.
Back in 2015, Alex Lubinsky did the most San Francisco thing imaginable: he spent over a month trying to rent an apartment. Listings everywhere, prices nowhere, ten applications, ten fees, ten background checks, and a landlord who picked someone else anyway. A UC Berkeley economics grad who'd worked as an investment banker on M&A deals, he looked at the rental market the way a banker looks at a bad spread - too much friction, too little transparency, money leaking at every step.
The diagnosis was simple and a little annoying, because it was obvious. Renting is a market with terrible information. Tenants don't know what to offer. Landlords don't know who's serious. Everyone fills out the same data ten times. The deposit - often thousands of dollars - sits frozen, helping no one. The market wasn't broken because people were lazy. It was broken because nobody had bothered to standardize it.
Lubinsky didn't go it alone. He co-founded Rentberry with Liliya Ostapchuk, Oleksandr Kotovskov and Denys Holubovskyi - a Ukrainian-rooted team that set up shop on Spear Street in San Francisco and started by attacking the most hated part of renting: the application and the deposit.
Their early bet was bold to the point of being divisive. In 2017 and 2018, Rentberry ran an Initial Coin Offering for a "BERRY" token, raising more than $20 million - reported at the time as the largest ICO in the real estate industry. The plan was a decentralized rental platform where token holders could crowdsource up to 90% of a renter's deposit and earn interest-style returns. It was the height of the blockchain era, and Rentberry leaned all the way in.
The irony, of course, is that the company most associated with crypto-era real estate is now better known for AI. The deposit-on-blockchain dream was the headline of one decade; the AI rental assistant is the headline of the next. What stayed constant was the underlying bet - that the rental lifecycle is a software problem hiding inside a paperwork problem.
Strip away the funding-round drama and Rentberry is, at heart, a workflow. A renter searches a global marketplace, takes a virtual tour, and applies with a single reusable profile. Automated screening runs in the background. The landlord reviews, negotiates if they want, and the two parties sign a digital lease. Rent collects itself. After move-in, the same system handles reminders and maintenance requests. Each of those used to be a separate company, a separate login, a separate fee.
Search and list long-term rentals across roughly 90 countries, with virtual tours and worldwide listing syndication.
A reusable rental profile plus automated background and credit screening - apply once, get vetted fast.
AI that matches listings to preferences, writes descriptions, detects amenities, messages landlords and negotiates price.
Legally binding e-signatures and digital rental contracts that close the deal without a single sheet of paper.
Automated online rent payments, recurring schedules and reminders so landlords stop chasing checks.
Furnished modular units with flexible mid-term leases that landlords can place on their land for extra income.
The modular-homes line is the surprise. A company that started as a website is now pioneering a chain of physical, furnished modular homes across the US, Europe and Asia - flexible mid-term stays for renters, and a new income stream for landlords with spare yard. It's a reminder that "proptech" eventually has to touch actual property.
Skeptics should read the figures the way the company reports them - ambitious, self-described, and worth checking. Rentberry says it processed more than 100 million properties across about 90 countries in 2025. It reports raising $90 million in 2024, lifting its valuation toward the $1 billion unicorn line. Earlier, its ICO pulled in over $20 million. The headline revenue estimate from third-party data is far smaller, around $3.9 million, which is the honest tension in every fast-growing platform story: reach is huge, monetization is still catching up.
Validation also came from the crowd. In 2020, more than 1,500 retail investors put in over $1.7 million in under three weeks through equity crowdfunding - the kind of vote that doesn't show up on a balance sheet but says something about belief. Backers like Berkeley Hills Capital and GTM Capital joined the later round.
The stated goal is transparency and automation: take searching, applying, screening, signing, paying and maintaining, and make all of it accessible from anywhere, for both sides of the deal. The deeper ambition is standardization. Booking a flight is the same anywhere on earth because the industry agreed on a process. Renting a home is different in every city, every building, every landlord's inbox. Rentberry's bet is that someone has to standardize it, and it would rather be the one holding the standard.
That ambition has an edge to it. A single platform that owns search, screening, the lease, the payment rail and the maintenance queue is convenient for renters and powerful for whoever runs it. The same automation that removes friction also concentrates control. Curious-but-skeptical readers should hold both ideas at once - the workflow genuinely helps, and the company genuinely benefits from being the place it all runs.
Here's the future Rentberry is selling, and it's worth taking seriously even if you discount the hype. You tell an AI what you want and your budget. It finds the places, tours them on your behalf, negotiates, and hands you a lease to sign. You never fill out a form twice. The landlord never reads a resume. The leasing office - the desk, the paper, the waiting - just isn't there anymore. Whether that arrives on the company's timeline is a separate question from whether it arrives at all.
Return to where we started. A month to find an apartment. Ten applications, ten fees, one rejection. Rentberry's whole existence is an argument that this was never necessary - that it was friction we mistook for process. The company hasn't finished proving it, and the revenue still trails the reach. But the direction is unmistakable: more of renting, handled by software, with fewer humans in the loop and fewer forms in the way. If they're right, the most boring month of your life becomes an afternoon. If they're wrong, at least someone finally tried to fix the DMV of housing.