He is trying to make renting feel like booking a hotel
Steve Carroll runs a company that, on a busy day, decides whether a few thousand people get to live somewhere. Findigs, the New York proptech firm he co-founded in 2018, now powers around 400,000 rental units across the United States. It used to call itself a tenant screening business. In June 2026, raising a $32 million Series C, Carroll stopped using that phrase entirely.
"We used to be a tenant screening business," he told the Commercial Observer. "Over the last two years, what we've built is an autonomous decisioning platform. So, instead of our customers having to consume data and use those data decisions, the product far exceeds what teams are capable of doing." The distinction matters more than it sounds. Screening hands a landlord a report. Deciding hands them an answer. Carroll is betting the whole company on the difference.
The pitch to operators is blunt and quantitative. Customers report up to 80 percent fewer evictions and 90 percent lower delinquency. One customer, the property manager McKinley, saw evictions fall 46 percent, acquisition costs drop a third, and occupancy hit 98.6 percent. Findigs claims it compresses the rental decision from an industry-average week to less than a day. When Carroll says he is "creating the category of leasing decisioning," that is the machinery underneath the phrase.
We are creating the category of leasing decisioning - a platform that makes a decision and helps you optimize revenue quality.
The bounced check
The origin story is smaller than the company it produced. Carroll was renting in New York when his bank silently stopped sending his rent checks. He nearly got evicted over a clerical failure he had no part in. More than 80 percent of American renters, he would later note, were still paying by check or cash. Most people, wronged by a bank, switch banks. Carroll took the grievance and kept pulling on it until it became a business.
He teamed up with a college friend, Keith Gilvar, to build an online rent-payment app. Before writing much code, the two ran the least glamorous market research imaginable: they went to New York bars with Typeform surveys and asked strangers how they paid rent. They collected roughly 1,000 responses. Gilvar, working the room, met his future girlfriend during the research - she reportedly assumed the survey was a pickup line before realizing he actually wanted to know about her rent.
The tip that became a pivot
The first version of Findigs was a free consumer app. The signal that something real was there came from an odd place: about 75 percent of users voluntarily tipped for a product that cost them nothing. But the more useful feedback came from the landlords already receiving Findigs payments. Brand partners kept telling Carroll the same thing - a renter is most valuable at the moment of move-in, not months later. He spent roughly six months researching before pivoting the whole company from a consumer payments app to B2B vertical SaaS for leasing and screening.
Never treat your transactions like relationships and never treat your relationships like transactions.
Ask Carroll what separates founders who make it, and he does not say vision or grit. He says the best ones have "the ability to understand when they're wrong, very quickly." It is a strange thing for a CEO to advertise, and also the exact skill that turned a tipped consumer app into a screening platform before the runway ran out.
The loop around real estate
Carroll's resume reads like a spiral around a single asset class. He started on Wall Street, joining Nomura Securities in 2014 as an associate on the securitized products desk, where his job put him next to mortgage-backed securities and rental-property loans. He left in 2017 to co-found and run operations at Seated, a restaurant and dining rewards startup that OpenTable acquired in 2018. Then came Findigs - back to real estate, but standing on the renter's side of the transaction he had once traded as a security. He studied political science and government at Colby College, not finance or computer science, which makes the eventual specialty - underwriting who is allowed to rent an apartment - a little less predictable.
The fairness question is one he raises unprompted. In his founding letter he argued that building this kind of product takes more than empathetic designers; it takes a diverse team willing to interrogate whether a decision is fair from many angles. When your software decides who gets housing, that is not a diversity slide in a deck. It is the load-bearing wall.
Where it is going
The 2026 Series C, led by RPM Ventures' Marc Weiser and Adam Boyden, pushed total funding to roughly $80 million. The board addition was the tell: Hugh R. Frater, former CEO of Fannie Mae and a founding partner at BlackRock, joined. A company that began with one man's bounced rent check now has a former Fannie Mae chief in the room. The new capital is aimed at product, hiring, and the hardest workflows in the business - affordable housing, including LIHTC and Section 8 - where automated decisioning meets the most regulated, least forgiving part of the rental market.
Carroll's stated ambition is small to say and enormous to do: make renting feel as seamless as booking a hotel, where an applicant sees the properties they qualify for and gets a quick, guaranteed answer. "I started Findigs to redesign the way people rent," he wrote. As of the last count, the company powers about 1 percent of the entire US rental real estate market - which is either a rounding error or the beachhead, depending on how the next decade goes.
Away from the platform, Carroll is a set of routines that do not obviously belong to a proptech CEO. He practices Wim Hof breathing exercises for productivity. He plays bridge, competitively. He fosters rescue dogs in New York. It is a portrait of someone who likes systems - breathing, card counting, tenant underwriting - and who found, in a bank's clerical mistake, one worth spending a decade fixing.