The architect who stopped designing buildings and started renting out their empty corners.
Yishai Lehavi. The look of a man who has calculated exactly how many hours a year your carpet cleaner sits unused.
Walk into an apartment building and you pass it without thinking: the awkward stretch of lobby by the mailboxes, the unloved patch of the bike room, the dead space nobody leases and nobody misses. Yishai Lehavi looked at that corner and saw a Dyson vacuum, a PlayStation 5, an e-scooter, a projector, and a carpet cleaner - all waiting for the two afternoons a year you actually need them.
That is TULU. Lehavi is its co-founder and CEO, and the company he has built puts smart, IoT-connected rental units directly inside residential buildings. Residents open an app, unlock a unit, and borrow the expensive thing they would otherwise buy, use twice, and store forever. When they are done, they put it back. The next neighbor takes a turn. Ownership becomes optional.
It sounds simple until you try to run it across 60 cities and 500,000 residents on two continents. TULU operates in New York, London, Amsterdam and dozens of cities in between, and it has raised roughly $53M to keep growing - including a $17M Series A extension in late 2025 co-led by GreenSoil PropTech Ventures, with Bosch Ventures and New Era Capital Partners along for the ride.
"Unlike selling a product, where value is proven once, creating a usage habit requires continuous insight and personalization."
Lehavi did not arrive at TULU through a business school case study. He trained and worked as an architect, a project leader at Groag-Harel Architects, thinking in floor plans and flows of people through space. His first venture was not about products at all. It was called SpaceSeat - a mobile app that tried to redistribute passengers evenly across the carriages of trains, trams and buses, so that one car was not packed while the next ran half empty.
Notice the pattern. Long before he rented anyone a vacuum, Lehavi was already obsessed with the same problem: valuable space sitting wasted while people crowd, hoard and duplicate. SpaceSeat was crowded trains. TULU is crowded closets. The medium changed. The instinct did not.
The company was born at MIT's designX accelerator, where Lehavi landed as a venture fellow alongside the Our Generation Speaks program. There he met Yael Shemer, an environmental entrepreneur who cared about consumption, waste and how much stuff a modern life quietly demands. He brought the built environment. She brought the argument for using less of it.
Their two obsessions stitched together into one thesis: cities are full of apartments, apartments are full of things people barely use, and the building itself is the most natural place to share them. The founders started in Israel, then moved the company to New York to chase the dense-apartment market where the idea makes the most sense. TULU's units went live in buildings in 2020.
Each TULU unit is stocked for the specific building it sits in. A young, gadget-heavy tower gets different inventory than a family building. Typical fare:
The clever part is who pays. Residents pay a small fee to borrow. Landlords pay for an amenity that, TULU argues, nudges tenants to renew their leases - a corner of dead space traded for stickier residents. And brands like Bosch and Karcher pay to place their products and, crucially, to see how people actually use them in the wild. A vacuum maker learns almost nothing after the sale. A vacuum living in a TULU unit reports back.
That data is the company's quiet moat. TULU has logged more than 10 million user interactions, which feed an AI layer the company calls, with admirable plainness, TULU Brain. It personalizes what each building stocks and tells landlords and brands what's really being used. Lehavi has said the company reached operational profitability while expanding across three continents - a rare sentence in proptech.
"We're aiming to redefine consumer habits by emphasizing usage over ownership."
The last sharing-economy wave promised less stuff and mostly delivered more apps. Lehavi went the other way. TULU is hardware. It is a plug-and-play box bolted into a room you already walk through every day. That is harder to build and slower to scale than a marketplace, but it is also how you change a habit - by putting the alternative between the resident and the elevator, not three taps deep in a phone.
The ambition is to make access-over-ownership boring. Standard. The kind of building infrastructure nobody thinks about, like the mailroom or the laundry. In 2026, RXR expanded its TULU partnership across its multifamily portfolio, a sign the pitch is landing with the people who own the corners.
Lehavi is still, at heart, an architect. He just designs behavior now instead of buildings - and the blueprint is the same one he has been drawing since the trains: find the wasted space, and refuse to leave it empty.
Figures per public reporting on TULU's Series A and its 2025 extension.
He's a trained architect who now designs habits instead of hallways.
His first startup, SpaceSeat, was about redistributing people on trains - not products in lobbies. Same instinct, different cargo.
TULU's AI layer is named, without a hint of jargon, "TULU Brain."
Vacuum giants like Bosch and Karcher pay to watch how their products get used inside TULU units - real-world telemetry no store sells.
He met his co-founder at an MIT accelerator table and left with a company on three continents.
The founders started in Israel, then moved the whole thing to New York to chase denser buildings.
Yishai Lehavi is the co-founder and CEO of TULU, a New York and Tel Aviv-born proptech company that turns dead lobby space in apartment buildings into 24/7 on-demand rental hubs for vacuums, gaming consoles, e-scooters and household goods. A trained architect who once built a mobile app to redistribute passengers on crowded trains, Lehavi met co-founder Yael Shemer at MIT's designX accelerator and bet the company on a simple idea: people want access to things, not ownership of them. TULU now serves more than 500,000 residents across 60 cities on both sides of the Atlantic and has raised roughly $53M in total funding.
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