multifamily-housing
(7)
Zekelman Industries
Most steel companies stop at the loading dock. Zekelman follows the material into warehouses, job sites and even finished apartments - a 149-year industrial lineage betting that control of the chain can make American construction faster and more predictable.
EliseAI
EliseAI is a New York-based artificial intelligence company that builds conversational and agentic AI to automate the routine, high-volume communication work of two administratively heavy industries: rental housing and healthcare. Its assistants answer calls, emails, texts and chats around the clock - scheduling tours, handling maintenance and renewals, collecting rent, and booking patient appointments - so property and clinic teams can focus on people rather than paperwork. Founded in 2017 as MeetElise, the company crossed $100M in annual recurring revenue, serves roughly 70% of the 50 largest U.S. rental housing operators, and reached a $2.2 billion valuation with its 2025 Series E led by Andreessen Horowitz.
Grotto AI
Grotto AI builds an AI coaching platform for multifamily leasing teams, listening in on calls and tours and nudging agents in real time toward the behaviors - curiosity, rapport, a well-timed laugh - that its data shows actually close leases. Founded in 2025 by Nick Deveau and Ben Epstein, veterans of the AI-in-insurance startup EvolutionIQ, the company raised a $10 million seed round led by ICONIQ Capital in February 2026 and already runs on portfolios for operators like Weidner Apartment Homes.
Zack Schmitz
Zack Schmitz is the co-founder and CEO of Public Grid, a renewable-energy platform that lets apartment renters switch to 100% clean electricity through their existing utility account at no added cost. A former Deloitte consultant with an MIT master's spanning electrical engineering and human-centered design, he built Public Grid (formerly Cottage Energy) to attack the unglamorous middle of the energy market: the roughly 20 million U.S. renters in deregulated states who never get a say in where their power comes from. The platform brokers clean energy in bulk, splits the savings, and follows residents from address to address.
Tailos
Tailos (formerly Maidbot) is an Austin, Texas robotics company building AI-powered autonomous cleaning robots for commercial spaces. Its flagship product, Rosie, is a self-navigating commercial robot vacuum that uses self-driving-car technology - LiDAR, 3D depth cameras, and proprietary SLAM - to clean hotels, multifamily buildings, and senior-living facilities with no pre-mapping or setup. The company's pitch is plain: automate the most repetitive, physically punishing parts of cleaning so housekeepers can do higher-value work, with operators saving roughly 54 minutes per labor hour.
Factory OS
Factory OS is a Vallejo, California modular-housing manufacturer that builds wood-frame multifamily apartments inside a former Mare Island Navy shipyard. Co-founded in 2017 by affordable-housing veteran Rick Holliday and contractor Larry Pace, the company treats apartments like cars: rolling them down an assembly line with union labor, cutting build times by ~40% and costs by 20–40% compared with conventional construction.
Rick Holliday
Rick Holliday is a San Francisco Bay Area real estate developer and social entrepreneur with nearly 50 years of experience building affordable and market-rate housing. He co-founded Factory OS in 2017 to revolutionize multifamily housing production through factory-based modular construction, securing $77.7M in funding from Google, Autodesk, Facebook, and Citi. His career spans co-founding Eden Housing (1978), BRIDGE Housing (early 1980s), and Holliday Development (1988), where he pioneered live-work loft conversions in SoMa. Factory OS, located in a former WWII submarine shipyard on Mare Island in Vallejo, demonstrated 40% faster delivery and 20-30% cost savings over traditional construction.