real-estate-technology
(35)
Jonathon Barkl Is Teaching Parking Lots to Pay Attention
A student parking problem became a lesson in door-to-door sales, operational grit, and the value of seeing what everyone else ignores. Now AirGarage is using parking as the first test of a larger idea: physical real estate can behave like software once it becomes observable.
The Engineer Who Learned to Sell the Story
An electrical engineer from the University of Illinois who talked his way out of the lab and into the room where the story gets told. Twenty-five years later, he runs marketing for one of proptech's biggest names.
Alex Chatzieleftheriou
He spent five years living out of hotel rooms as a consultant. Then he built the company that lets you move into a city with nothing but a suitcase.
Takeshi Homma
Takeshi (Ted) Homma is the founder and CEO of HOMMA Group, a Palo Alto smart-home designer, developer and builder he started in 2016. Descended from a Japanese family with fifteen generations in the building trades, he spent years at Sony and Rakuten before setting out to build what he calls a 'housing version of Tesla' - turnkey homes with proprietary, AI-driven technology woven into modern architecture. HOMMA has delivered pre-configured smart-home communities in Portland and proof-of-concept units in Boston, and partnered with a Mitsubishi Corporation subsidiary to scale the idea.
Cayce Ullman
Cayce Ullman is the CEO and co-founder of ListingSpark, an Austin-based real estate technology company that lets homeowners list, market, and sell their properties for a flat daily fee instead of a traditional agent commission. Before ListingSpark he spent more than two decades building software and engineering teams, including co-founding the media platform Plex, leading product development at security firm AlienVault, and holding engineering roles at Cisco's IronPort division and E*TRADE. He holds a computer science degree from the University of Southern California and blends deep technical experience with a consumer-first approach to selling homes.
Chase Garbarino
Chase Garbarino is the co-founder and CEO of HqO, a Boston-based proptech company whose software helps commercial landlords manage the tenant and workplace experience across hundreds of buildings worldwide. Before HqO, he built and sold Streetwise Media, the company behind local innovation-news brands like BostInno and AmericanInno, and later founded VentureApp. A lifelong Boston sports fan and runner with an entrepreneurial streak going back to reselling Pogs in fifth grade, Garbarino has spent more than a decade using technology to build networks and communities for startups, small businesses, and now the commercial real estate industry.
Chen Konfino
Chen Konfino is the founder and CEO of Younity, a New York-based PropTech company that rebuilds the communications backbone of residential and commercial buildings. Founded in 2018, Younity delivers property-wide intelligent WiFi, building-system monitoring, and cyber protection through a single software platform, turning connectivity into a source of net operating income for property owners. Before Younity, Chen was product and IT manager at data-security firm Vaultive, which was acquired by CyberArk, and earlier served in the Israel Defense Forces' Military Intelligence. He blends a security-first engineering mindset with a bet that reliable, always-on connectivity is now core building infrastructure.
Ed Wolff
Ed Wolff is the CEO and board member of Aerwave, a Dallas-based company that builds and operates managed Wi-Fi networks for multifamily apartment communities. A multifamily-industry veteran with more than 25 years in real estate and technology, he joined Aerwave in 2024 as president and chief revenue officer before stepping into the CEO role, and has led the company through a Series B raise, expansion across dozens of U.S. markets, and recognition as a Broadband Communities Multifamily Partner of the Year. Wolff's earlier career spans senior roles at LeaseLock, RealPage, Cortland, Pinnacle, and Place Properties.
Georgianna Oliver
Georgianna W. Oliver is the founder and CEO of Tour24, a Massachusetts-based proptech company whose platform lets prospective renters take self-guided, app-driven tours of apartment communities without an on-site leasing agent. A serial entrepreneur with a two-decade track record, she previously built and sold EverGreen Solutions and AptBudget (both to RealPage) and Package Concierge (acquired by Gibraltar Industries). She holds two patents for self-guided tours and has been recognized as a 2024 Mass Technology Leadership Council CEO of the Year honoree and a 2025 Female Trailblazers of SaaS Award winner.
Matt Barba
Matt Barba is the co-founder and CEO of Placester, a Boston-based SaaS platform that gives real estate agents and brokers websites, IDX/MLS integration, CRM, and marketing automation. He started coding as a kid, worked as a Boston real estate agent while at BU, built a widely used WordPress real estate plugin called Builder, and launched Placester in 2011 with CTO Frederick Townes. The company raised roughly $115M across rounds from NEA, Romulus Capital, and Techstars. Barba appeared on the Swanepoel POWER 200 list of top real estate industry leaders in 2015, 2016, and 2017.
Michael Mandel
Michael Mandel is the co-founder and CEO of CompStak, a New York-based commercial real estate data platform that crowdsources lease and sale comparables from brokers, appraisers, and researchers, then sells verified analytics to landlords, lenders, and investors. A former Grubb & Ellis broker who got tired of chaotic Monday-morning comp-swaps, he launched CompStak in 2012 with Vadim Belobrovka and has since raised roughly $89M and built a national platform used across every major U.S. market.
Rob Hayden
Rob Hayden is the CEO and co-founder of Renew, a New York based AI powered retention platform for multifamily and single family rental operators. He co-founded the company in 2021 with Kevin Murphy after both worked together at rental insurance startup Jetty. In October 2025 Renew closed a $12 million Series A led by Haymaker Ventures with participation from Goldcrest Capital and Upfront Ventures, bringing total funding to roughly $20 million and financing the launch of the industry's first Resident Referral Network.
Ryan Barone
Ryan Barone is the co-founder, CEO, and CTO of RentRedi, a New York-based property management platform he started in 2016 after failing to secure an apartment because gathering application documents was miserable. RentRedi now serves nearly 200,000 landlords and renters, manages tens of billions in assets, and has raised more than $17M across seed and Series A rounds. Barone still writes code, still runs the company, and still argues that landlord software should not feel like a spreadsheet with a login.
Stephen Carroll
Stephen (Steve) Carroll is the co-founder and CEO of Findigs, a New York proptech company that turns rental tenant screening into an autonomous leasing decision. A former Wall Street structured-products salesman who then ran ops at the restaurant startup Seated, Carroll built Findigs after a bank quietly stopped mailing his rent checks and nearly got him evicted. The company started as a free consumer rent-payment app validated in NYC bars with Typeform surveys, then pivoted to B2B software. As of 2026 it powers roughly 400,000 rental units, has raised about $80M including a $32M Series C, and pitches operators on cutting evictions by up to 80%.
Yotam Cohen
Yotam Cohen is the co-founder and CEO of Daisy, an AI-native property management company he started in 2019 to fix the way condos, co-ops, and HOAs are run. Before Daisy he co-founded Wibbitz, a video technology company acquired by Vimeo, and served as a naval officer in the Israel Defense Forces. From a single SoHo building signed in 2021, Daisy has grown into what city data calls New York's fastest-growing management company, now overseeing more than 100 buildings across New York and New Jersey with plans to expand nationally by 2028 and globally by 2030.
Kul Wadhwa
Kul Wadhwa is the CEO and founder of BeyondView, a San Francisco proptech company building photorealistic digital twins and game-like walkthroughs for commercial real estate. Before BeyondView, he spent six years at the Wikimedia Foundation, where he ran business development and mobile and launched Wikipedia Zero, bringing free Wikipedia access to over half a billion people in 22 developing-world countries.
Benjamin Pleat
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.
Eric Tsai
Eric Tsai is the co-founder and CEO of Asteroom, a proptech company that turns an ordinary smartphone into a professional 3D virtual tour studio. A former Facebook data scientist, he left big tech in 2019 to chase a stubborn problem in real estate: high-quality property visualization was too expensive and too complicated for the average agent. Under his lead, Asteroom grew to serve tens of thousands of agents and built a nationwide network of certified data collectors, becoming the first 3D tour platform to power property data collection for Freddie Mac's ACE+ PDR and Fannie Mae's value-acceptance programs.
Luke Groesbeck
Luke Groesbeck is the co-founder and CEO of Foundation, the buyer experience platform that drags homebuilding - one of the last big offline industries - online. After two decades building and scaling Silicon Valley startups including the now-public Opendoor and Eventbrite, he teamed up with two Opendoor colleagues to build what they call 'Shopify for homebuilders': white-labeled apps that carry a buyer from first tour through closing and into the warranty years. Backed by Y Combinator's Summer 2023 batch, Foundation grew 5x in 2025 and now powers the homeowner apps of more than 40% of the top-200 U.S. builders.
Nick Deveau
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.
Nick Whalley
Nick Whalley is the co-founder and CEO of Nutiliti, a utility management platform that handles the unglamorous but expensive work of turning power, water, and gas on and off across rental portfolios. A Dartmouth-trained engineer who spent three years on Goldman Sachs's electronic trading desk before leaving in 2020 to build software for property managers, Whalley runs a company whose pitch is blunt: manage properties, not utilities. Nutiliti automates activations, deactivations, bill payment, and accounting reconciliation, and exposes it all through a REST API so single-family rental and build-to-rent operators can stop drowning in utility paperwork.
Remen Okoruwa
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.
Brendan Fairbanks
Brendan Fairbanks is the founder and CEO of Perchwell, the modern MLS technology and data platform for residential real estate. A former finance professional who taught himself to code after the 2008 crash, he built Perchwell to bring the quantitative rigor of capital markets to the world's largest asset class. Launched in New York, Perchwell now operates the de facto MLS of the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY) and is expanding to MLS organizations nationwide. In July 2024 the company raised a $25M Series B led by Lux Capital, bringing total funding to roughly $55M.
Grant Drzyzga
Grant Drzyzga is the founder and CEO of Revela, a Detroit-based property management software company he started in 2014 with $50,000 and no real estate experience. After bootstrapping for roughly nine and a half years, he raised a $9 million Series A led by FirstMark Capital in November 2023. Revela now serves more than 200,000 units and has become one of the largest lenders to property managers in cities like Detroit, St. Louis, and Gary. Drzyzga's pitch is that real estate software should be built 'from the books out' - accounting first - and that embedded financial services can bring liquidity to a market that has long been low-margin and illiquid.
James Gallagher
James Gallagher is the CEO and co-founder of GreenLite, a New York based construction technology company that pairs AI with licensed architects, engineers, and former regulators to deliver code-compliant building permits in days rather than months. A former Marine infantry and intelligence officer who deployed to Afghanistan, Gallagher spent a decade scaling the physical footprints of venture-backed companies like Gopuff, Bandit, and Good Uncle before realizing that permitting was the real bottleneck holding builders back. He founded GreenLite in 2022 with fellow Gopuff alum Ben Allen, and has since raised $86M across three rounds, including a $49.5M Series B led by Insight Partners in September 2025.
Jeffrey Carleton
Jeffrey Carleton is the co-founder and CEO of Runwise, a New York-based smart-building company that pairs proprietary wireless sensors with cloud software to cut the energy that boilers, cooling, electric and water systems waste. Drawing on seven years spent running 150 New York apartment buildings, he turned a hands-on operator's frustration with 1960s heating controls into a platform now deployed in more than 10,000 buildings, serving roughly 1,000 customers and saving over $100 million in energy costs. In June 2025 Runwise raised a $55 million Series B led by Menlo Ventures, bringing total funding to $79 million, around a thesis Carleton states bluntly: every building needs to be rebuilt with software, not bricks.
John Meadows
John Meadows is the co-founder and co-CEO of Bowery Valuation, a New York-based proptech company building the first vertically integrated appraisal-tech platform for commercial real estate. A certified appraiser who valued more than $3 billion of property at BBG before he turned 30, Meadows left the legacy appraisal world in 2015 to rebuild it from scratch with partners Noah Isaacs and Cesar Devers. He runs the company as a co-CEO partnership, has raised over $80 million in venture funding, and treats company culture as a system to be engineered rather than a slogan.
Kevin Song
Kevin Song is the founder and CEO of withco, a New York-based company helping small business owners buy the buildings they rent through a lease-to-own model. The son of Korean immigrants whose Brooklyn grocery store was lost when a landlord doubled the rent, Song turned that family loss into a venture-backed mission: turn tenants into owners. A Cornell economics graduate and former J.P. Morgan analyst named to Forbes 30 Under 30 for social entrepreneurship, he raised more than $30 million from Founders Fund, Canaan, NFX and Initialized, plus backers including Venus Williams, Kevin Durant, Will Smith's Dreamers VC and former HUD Secretary Julian Castro.
Nora Apsel
Nora Apsel is the co-founder and CEO of Morty, the New York-based online mortgage marketplace she helped build from a Techstars idea in 2016 into a full-stack platform that has facilitated over $2 billion in home loans across 45+ states. She joined as Morty's founding engineer, rose to COO, and took the CEO seat in 2020. A former nonprofit worker who retooled as a software engineer at Meetup and Flurry, she is driven by using product and technology to democratize access to financial products and make one of life's most opaque transactions - getting a mortgage - transparent and buyer-first.
Oleksiy Lubinsky
Oleksiy Lubinsky (also known as Alex Lubinsky) is the co-founder and CEO of Rentberry, a San Francisco-based platform that automates the long-term rental process from search and custom-offer negotiation to digital leases, rent payments and maintenance. A Ukrainian native and UC Berkeley economics graduate who came out of investment banking, he sold his first company, the networking app City Hour, in 2015 before launching Rentberry that same year. He has pushed the company through one of crypto's most-talked-about ICOs, an AI rebrand, and serial equity-crowdfunding rounds, framing Rentberry as a bid to strip the friction, fees and middlemen out of renting.