The future of home sales, in Sofia Vyshnevska’s telling, begins with something almost embarrassingly old-fashioned: somebody answers. A buyer asks about a floor plan at night. Another wonders what the monthly payment might be. A third toured six months ago, watched rates rise, and quietly disappeared into a builder’s customer database. The ordinary machinery of sales has a way of turning people into rows. Vyshnevska keeps turning the rows back into people.
She has spent more than a decade circling one stubborn question. Why is buying a home so difficult for the buyer and selling one so cumbersome for the builder? The buyer is making a purchase that can shape decades, yet often knows less than the lender, the agent or the builder. The builder, meanwhile, can possess thousands of expressions of interest and too few hours to answer them. One party is short of information. The other is short of attention. Jome, the company Vyshnevska co-founded and now leads as CEO, has occupied the space between those shortages.
The seventh door
Vyshnevska was born in Ukraine and trained in international economics and business, earning degrees in Lviv and an MBA in Vienna. Her route into property technology began at Brainify, a sales-automation company for European real-estate developers built by Dan Hnatkovskyy. She joined the business in customer success. The pairing lasted longer than the product. They wanted to build something larger together, and in 2018 began the company that would pass through the names Propertymate and NewHomesMate before becoming Jome.
Founding mythology likes a single flash of recognition. Their actual beginning had fluorescent airport lighting. Six accelerator programs declined them. Y Combinator brought them to San Francisco for an interview and passed. They fell short at 500 Startups twice. Then Techstars Austin admitted them to its 2019-2020 class. The seventh door opened, briefly, onto a room called March 2020.
Demo day ended. Covid arrived. Fundraising stopped. But Austin began filling with newcomers, and newly built houses were a meaningful part of the available supply. The founders noticed that no single place gathered those homes in a form a buyer could comfortably search and compare. In September 2020 they launched the marketplace that became the business’s real beginning.
“Tipping points usually occur when everything seems hopeless.”Sofia Vyshnevska
Hopelessness would become a recurring, unwelcome adviser. In February 2022, Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Vyshnevska was there. The company had to relocate staff from the country’s east to its west, and some employees continued working from metro stations during bombardments and power cuts. Part of Jome’s team remains in Ukraine. The company kept operating, but a phrase like “kept operating” is tidy in the way lived experience rarely is.
A company with several front doors
The marketplace expanded. By 2024, Vyshnevska described service across 15 American markets; later accounts put the tech-enabled brokerage at more than 100 agents in more than 30 markets. That December, the company announced a $9.8 million Series A led by Geek Ventures, bringing reported funding to $16.5 million. NewHomesMate became Jome, pronounced like “home.” The name compresses “Joy of New Home” into one cheerful syllable.
A new name did not freeze the company in place. Through 2025, Jome tested artificial intelligence inside its own operation. The team knew new construction, had a large body of buyer conversations and had seen what happened after a lead entered a builder’s system. Marketing budgets had tightened. Sales teams concentrated on walk-ins and buyers who appeared ready. Everyone else waited, sometimes indefinitely.
In January 2026, the founders made another turn: take that technology directly to builders. Jome’s agents would call, text and email; learn each builder’s inventory, financing, brand voice and sales process; answer questions; revive quiet leads; and schedule model-home visits. Hnatkovskyy later wrote that thousands of families had found homes through the earlier model. Now the machinery developed inside it would become the product.
Eight calls and a Christmas tree
The commercial argument is arithmetic. Vyshnevska has cited a builder with 65,000 leads sitting in its database. Reaching one person can take about eight attempts. No ordinary team can repeatedly work that equation at such scale. An AI agent can be tireless without becoming irritable, which is either a technical advantage or a personality defect put to good use.
Her philosophical argument is more interesting. She does not want technology to conquer every room. Searchable information, immediate answers and scheduling belong to software. A visit to a model home is different. Someone may need to point out how the afternoon light enters, where the Christmas tree might stand, or what life on the porch could feel like. Those are not database lookups. They are acts of shared imagination.
Give the machine
The late-night question, the inventory lookup, the eighth attempt, the tour calendar and the cold lead that may merely be waiting.
Keep for people
The walk through a model home, the difficult judgment, the imagined Christmas tree and the hand squeezed before a signature.
Vyshnevska once watched a couple sign for a home. Just before the pen moved, one squeezed the other’s hand. She later wrote that no AI should have been in that room. The line is useful because it refuses the dreary choice between techno-romance and techno-panic. Her test is practical: what does the machine make more space for?
“The best AI is the one that gives humans more time to be human.”Sofia Vyshnevska
Jome tells people when its digital assistant is an AI. On one occasion, a buyer asked to leave a favorable review for the assistant. It explained its digital condition and offered a human connection. The buyer insisted. It had listened; it had answered everything. The Jome team celebrated. In an organizational sense, they were the AI’s management, a promotion nobody had thought to put on LinkedIn.
This does not make Vyshnevska naïve about automation. She says jobs will change and some will disappear. She also talks about bugs, glitches and the painstaking work of building workflows with each customer. “Magic” is not among the deliverables. Curiosity is. Her advice to builders is concise: do not fear the technology; use it where it is needed, disclose it, and stay interested in what it can do.
The first startup
Work explains only part of her appetite for forward motion. Vyshnevska became a mother at 17 and calls her son her first startup. The joke is affectionate, though it has the compressed seriousness of a founder’s pitch. She credits motherhood with discipline, resilience and the need to continue. She has said she advocates for hiring mothers for precisely those qualities.
Her candor extends to smaller defeats. Vyshnevska admits that names escape her; once, mortifyingly, an investor’s name did. She decided the lapse mattered less than what followed. Her rule became permission to forget, recover and keep building. It is a charmingly modest operating doctrine for someone whose company has repeatedly required strategic amnesia: the willingness to release a former plan without losing the purpose beneath it.
Long before Jome acquired its current name, a book helped the partnership acquire a language. At 18, Vyshnevska read Atlas Shrugged. It made an impression, and it became the first book she and Hnatkovskyy discussed. She remembers the conversation as evidence of common ground. The tidier founder tale would claim the company followed from the novel; the lived version took years of software work, customer interviews and wrong turns. Ideas can introduce two people. A business still has to survive contact with buyers, balance sheets and Tuesday morning.
In August 2026, Vyshnevska stepped into the CEO role while Hnatkovskyy became president and chairman. She described the handoff as a new chapter, not a rupture. Their old question survived the title changes. The homebuyer still enters a system designed by people who know more. The builder still has paid-for interest going unattended. The opportunity is to close the informational distance without evicting humanity from the transaction.
There is an ambition here beyond better follow-up. Vyshnevska has spoken about affordability, sustainability and returning control to buyers. Jome cannot build the missing houses or rewrite zoning rules. It can make information quicker to reach, help builders notice demand they already have, and reduce the number of people who abandon the idea because the process feels opaque. It is less cinematic than inventing the house of tomorrow. It may be more useful to answer the phone today.
The arc of Vyshnevska’s career is therefore not a straight path from Ukraine to Austin, or from marketplace to artificial intelligence. It is a sequence of doors, some closed by committees, some by history, some opened by a new way of naming an old problem. She keeps moving through them with the same question in hand. Somewhere, a buyer is waiting for an answer. Somewhere else, a salesperson needs enough time and energy to be fully present. The machine can make the eighth call. The person can talk about the light.