He runs a company built on the premise that the six weeks before a lease expires are, by revenue, the most important weeks in the entire building.
In multifamily rental housing, roughly half of residents move out each year. Everyone in the industry knows this. The interesting question is what Rob Hayden noticed about it: that most of the software built in the last decade of proptech was pointed at leasing - the moment a new customer arrives - and almost none at the moment the existing one decides whether to leave. Renew, the company he co-founded in 2021 with his former Jetty colleague Kevin Murphy, is a bet that the second problem is worth more than the first.
Hayden's pitch to investors and operators has changed almost not at all in five years. He describes a scene: a resident is coming up on the end of their lease. A property management company sends a form letter with a new rent number attached, sometimes higher, sometimes flat. The resident either signs it, negotiates it, or moves. If they move, the property loses somewhere between two and four months of revenue before someone new is in the unit, plus turn costs, plus concessions to attract a replacement.
Then the resident goes and rents somewhere else. Frequently in the same city. Sometimes in a building owned by the same operator, though nobody at the operator will ever know that.
Renew is software built for the six weeks before that form letter goes out. It pulls together rent-roll data, market comps, unit-level history, resident preferences and communication tools, and then it produces renewal offers that treat the moment as a negotiation between two parties who both want the same thing. Occupancy stays higher. Rent moves come in more predictably. NOI - the language the owners speak - goes up.
The company calls its expanded product a Resident Referral Network, announced with the Series A. The idea is that if a resident is going to move anyway - because they need three bedrooms instead of one, or they're changing cities - the operator should have a way to keep that resident inside the brand rather than losing them to whoever runs the next building down. Hayden has described this from the beginning as the actual point of the company. Everything else is a lead-in.
Renew's customer list, disclosed in the Series A announcement, includes W.C. Smith, JC Hart, Kettler, Lindy, Gates Hudson and Bozzuto. These are large institutional operators with many thousands of units. Renew is quietly running a piece of the retention math for a real slice of the American rental stock.
Where most operators see the end of a lease, we see the start of a longer relationship.- Rob Hayden, on the Renew thesis
Renew was founded in January 2021. It announced its official launch, along with more than $8 million in seed funding, in April 2023. In between, according to interviews Hayden has given, he and Murphy took roughly two years to build.
That is not how proptech is usually done. The category has, in general, favored fast launches and iterative rollouts to a small number of friendly operators. Hayden's version was slower because his framing of the problem was wider: he wanted the tool to be usable by a resident, a leasing agent on a site team, a regional manager, an owner, and an executive at a management company - all at once, all with different incentives.
"We deliberately took two years before launch to ensure the solution worked comprehensively across the entire multifamily ecosystem rather than rushing to market prematurely," he has said, more or less, in every interview since. It is the most Hayden thing about Hayden.
Hayden's route to a Williamsburg proptech office is not a straight line. He grew up on the professional-services track: a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and Public Policy from Southern Methodist University, then a JD/MBA from Boston College Law School, class of 2014. He never went into law practice.
Early jobs included time at Hunt Consolidated - the Dallas oil, real estate and investment holding company - and at telehealth company American Well in a legal and operations capacity. In 2014, still in his twenties, he joined New York Life Insurance Company as a Director focused on technology investments, effectively working inside NYL Ventures, the insurer's corporate venture arm. This is where the pattern showed up: Hayden looked at technology companies from the balance-sheet side before he ran one.
In late 2016 he left the venture desk to join Jetty, a New York rental fintech that built deposit-alternative products for renters. He became VP of Sales and Strategic Partnerships. He stayed four years. Kevin Murphy was there too. Between them they helped push Jetty's distribution past a million contracted units, which is the sort of number that quietly gives a co-founding team credibility when they later show up asking apartment owners to trust them again.
By early 2021 Hayden was ready to start his own thing, and he did the sensible founder move: he brought a friend.
Murphy spent nearly a decade at rental listings company RentPath before Jetty and knows the property management side of the business from the operator's point of view. Hayden brings the investor's lens and the sales system. Between them there is a division of labor that founders often claim to have and rarely do: one person who has actually run the workflow the software will replace, and one person who has watched a lot of software companies get valued by people writing checks. Renew was funded on the strength of both of those angles at once.
Hayden speaks in operator language, not founder language. In his public interviews - the CollectiveConversations sit-down on YouTube, the REBA Q&A, the various trade-press profiles - the vocabulary is NOI, turn cost, portfolio-wide retention, revenue-per-door, renewal rate. He does not use the word "disruption" much. He uses the word "moment" a lot.
His public quotes tend to name a specific mechanism rather than a broad claim. He notices, for instance, that the industry has spent years talking about resident relationships without ever solving for the fact that the relationship structurally ends every twelve months. He asks what a tool would look like that could ask a renter to stay a customer regardless of whether the same physical unit is right for them. And he narrows to the financial claim: renewals, done well, move revenue and asset value at the same time.
He is, in the specific technical sense of the word, boring. This turns out to be a feature. Multifamily owners have been sold a lot of software.
The $12 million Series A closed in October 2025. Haymaker Ventures led. Goldcrest Capital and Upfront Ventures followed. And - the part that reads unusual on the press release - a group of Renew's own customers wrote checks into the round.
Customer capital in a venture round is a signal that goes in one direction. Operators do not, as a rule, invest in software they are unhappy with. When you see a Series A with material participation from the buying side of the market, the pitch mostly writes itself: it is difficult to build a competing platform when the buyers of that platform are on the cap table of the incumbent.
The money is being used, per the announcement, to scale the retention platform and to build out the Resident Referral Network - the piece of the product that keeps a renter inside a brand's portfolio even when the specific unit is wrong.
We noticed a lot of people talking about building long-term relationships with residents, but they had no plan for how to combat the fact that basically 50% of their customers move every year.
What if you had a tool that let you ask a resident to renew as your customer regardless of the product or geography they need?
Modernizing your renewals process leads to greater resident retention, more revenue and increased asset value.
Where most operators see the end of a lease, we see the start of a longer relationship.
Started his career adjacent to Hunt Oil in Dallas. Ended up building software for apartment renewals in Brooklyn. There is not a straight line here; there does not need to be.
Trained as a lawyer at Boston College. Never practiced. The JD reads more like a hedge than a career.
Renew's office at 240 Kent Avenue is a block from the East River, in a building better known for consumer and creative tenants than Sun Belt apartment software.
Renew waited two full years between founding and public launch. Most proptech waits two months.
CEO and co-founder of Renew, a New York based AI powered resident retention and lease renewal platform for multifamily and single family rental operators.
January 2021, by Hayden and Kevin Murphy, both alumni of rental fintech startup Jetty.
Renew closed a $12 million Series A in October 2025 led by Haymaker Ventures, following an $8 million-plus seed round announced in 2023. Roughly $20 million total.
VP of Sales & Strategic Partnerships at Jetty from 2016 to 2021. Before that, a Director at New York Life Insurance Company focused on technology investments.
JD/MBA from Boston College Law School, and a BA in Political Science & Public Policy from Southern Methodist University.