Benjamin (Ben) Pleat is the CEO and co-founder of Cobu, a Boston-based resident-engagement platform that turns apartment buildings into actual communities. After watching his extroverted mother feel isolated in a well-appointed Manhattan building - and learning that apartment owners bleed money to roughly 50% annual tenant churn - he built a company on a simple bet: a single friend in your building makes you 30%+ more likely to renew your lease. A Harvard economics grad who passed through WeWork's growth team and Goldman Sachs' real estate private equity group, Pleat now leads a company that has powered community in tens of thousands of apartment homes by getting neighbors into the same room for poker nights, potlucks, and chef dinners.
Nick Deveau is the co-founder and CEO of Grotto AI, a New York startup building real-time AI coaching for apartment leasing teams. A Stanford-trained AI engineer who helped build the technology behind EvolutionIQ's $730 million sale, Deveau now bets that humans, not bots, close the deals that matter most. His platform, Guidance, listens to leasing calls and tours, decodes what makes top agents great, and whispers that playbook to everyone else in real time. In February 2026 Grotto raised a $10 million seed round led by ICONIQ Capital.
Remen Okoruwa is the co-founder and CEO of Propexo, a Y Combinator-backed Boston startup building a unified API for property management software. Pitched as 'Plaid for commercial real estate,' Propexo lets engineers connect to legacy systems like Yardi, RealPage and Entrata in days instead of months. An Iowa kid who studied engineering at Harvard, Remen took a winding road through McKinsey, a churn-fighting data startup, product leadership at HubSpot, and a rent-payments venture before landing on the unglamorous but enormous problem of moving property data. He now powers integrations behind more than half of the NMHC Top 15 managers.
PASE (Peoples Associates Structural Engineers) is a San Jose-based structural and seismic engineering consultancy founded in 1990. Ranked among the largest engineering firms in Silicon Valley, PASE designs the bones of buildings that have to stay standing - hyperscale data centers for Meta and Vantage, multifamily and mixed-use communities, commercial and institutional projects, plus seismic retrofits and non-structural anchorage. With roughly 69 staff and 250+ years of combined experience across offices in California, Maryland and Croatia, the firm pairs heavy engineering rigor with a collaboration-first culture it calls 'The PASE Way.'
Banner is an enterprise capital expenditure (CapEx) management platform built for commercial real estate owners, operators, and developers. It replaces spreadsheets, email threads, and disconnected tools with one system that runs the full capital process - budgeting, bidding, bid leveling, cost tracking, invoicing, and lender draws. Banner says customers automate 80%+ of administrative work and save up to 10% on project costs, and the platform manages more than $10 billion in capital expenditure.
Leonardo247 is a cloud-based, mobile-first property operations and maintenance platform built for the multifamily real estate industry. Its software - often referred to as 'Leo' - pushes daily tasks, workflows, inspections, preventative maintenance and compliance procedures to onsite teams so nothing slips through the cracks. Founded in 2014 by industry veteran Daniel Cunningham after a building he managed lost hot water due to a missed maintenance step, the company now counts half of the nation's ten largest multifamily owners and operators among its customers and has appeared on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies.
Revela is a Detroit-based proptech company building an all-in-one property management platform that fuses double-entry, GAAP-grade accounting with leasing, maintenance, payments, reporting, and embedded banking. Founded in 2014 by Grant Drzyzga and bootstrapped for nearly a decade before raising a $9M Series A in 2023, Revela aims to bring liquidity and modern software to a historically low-margin, fragmented industry, serving managers of single-family, multifamily, affordable, commercial, and student housing across hundreds of thousands of units.
Ken McDonald is the CEO of Leonardo247, a Plano, Texas proptech company whose proactive operations and maintenance software runs across more than 2 million rental units. A Stanford MBA and Dartmouth math-and-economics grad, he has spent 25-plus years turning small online businesses into large ones - scaling LifePics from a few thousand users to 12 million, helping push TeamSnap past 15 million users as Chief Growth Officer, and running dozens of SaaS and payments products as Chief Product Officer at Togetherwork. He co-wrote 'How to Acquire Your First Million Customers' and now applies an operator-first view of AI to the unglamorous world of apartment maintenance.
Neil Rubler is the founder and CEO of Vessel Technologies, a New York company that mass-produces small, prefabricated, solar-ready apartment buildings and sells them through the housing industry's first franchise model. After two decades running large multifamily real estate firms - Vantage Properties and then Candlebrook Properties, which oversaw more than $3 billion in assets across seven states - he left conventional development behind in 2017 to attack the so-called Missing Middle: people who earn too much for subsidized housing and too little for market rate. A Wharton MBA and magna cum laude Cornell graduate, Rubler treats housing like a manufactured product rather than a construction project, aiming to build higher-quality homes faster, cheaper, and more sustainably.
Vessel Technologies is a New York-based housing product company that designs, manufactures, and franchises attainably priced apartment buildings for the 'missing middle' - working people who earn too much for subsidized housing and too little for market-rate rents. Using a panelized, IKEA-style off-site construction system, Vessel builds all-electric, solar-powered, universally accessible apartments that fit on small urban lots and go up in under a year for a fraction of conventional cost.
Gino A. Canori is President and CEO of Related California's market-rate division, overseeing a $10 billion development pipeline of more than 7,000 multifamily and senior housing units and over 5 million square feet of commercial space across California. A 25-year veteran of the firm, he shepherded landmark projects like Frank Gehry's $1 billion The Grand LA and Coterie Cathedral Hill into the skylines of Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Azlan Ezaddin is the President and CEO of PASE (Peoples Associates Structural Engineers), a Silicon Valley structural engineering firm he has led for 35 years. A licensed Structural Engineer in six U.S. states with P.E. credentials across 28 states and four Canadian provinces, Ezaddin holds a Master's degree from Stanford University and is widely regarded as a foremost authority on mission-critical data center structural design - having engineered facilities for Meta across three continents. In a striking contrast to load-bearing calculations, he co-founded CriticalDance in 1999, an international nonprofit arts publication, and writes about ballet with the same analytical precision he brings to seismic codes.
Hannah Greenberg is the CEO of Eleven Software, the cloud-based Wi-Fi authentication platform powering connectivity for 25,000+ hotel properties across 140+ countries - processing over 10 billion authentications per year for brands like Hilton, Marriott, Accor, and Wyndham. She acquired Eleven in 2022 through a search fund she built after her MBA at UC Berkeley Haas, then led the 2023 acquisition of UK-based Airangel to create the world's leading hospitality Wi-Fi management company. A Cornell Hotel School alumna with roots in PwC consulting and $1 billion in hotel development at Seaview Investors, Greenberg brings the rare combination of an owner-operator's instinct and a technologist's ambition to one of hospitality's most infrastructure-critical categories.
Lisa Petrucci is the CEO of Brilliant NextGen Inc., the San Mateo-based company behind the leading in-wall smart home touchscreen control panels trusted by builders and property managers across North America. A veteran of Dun & Bradstreet, Joyent, and Six Apart, she joined Brilliant in 2018 as VP of Business Development before stepping up to lead the company through a pivotal acquisition in 2024 and a $9.7M funding round in 2025. Under her leadership, Brilliant has launched a second-generation AI-ready control platform and a Power over Ethernet professional line, cementing its position at the intersection of smart home hardware, multifamily real estate, and connected living.