MeetElise, an NYC-based startup that’s bringing artificial intelligence to the apartment leasing sector, announced Tuesday it closed on a $6.5 million Series A round, bringing the company’s total money raised to $8.5 million.
Traditional apartment hunting is full of inefficiencies that were made even worse by the COVID-19 pandemic. Touring a multi-family building brings risk, which means it takes even more effort to coordinate and ensure everyone is staying safe. Elise, the company’s digital leasing assistant, helps by taking over the more time-consuming and mundane communication with prospective residents, streamlining the process. Plus, the tool can be integrated with existing property management software, which makes the lives of leasing agents easier in the end.
“Elise is responsible 24/7 and always answers emails, calls and texts immediately — saving our client leasing teams two to three hours a day (on average) to focus on other tasks serving prospective and current residents,” co-founder and CEO Minna Song said in a statement. “We launched MeetElise with the desire to make housing more accessible — but instead of building houses, we decided to take the approach of building scalable software to help existing residential property managers run more efficiently and profitably.”
MeetElise is currently being deployed in more than 250,000 multifamily communities nationwide, counting Equity Residential and Avalon Bay — two of the largest property management companies in the country — as clients.
The company also claims the number of apartments using its platform has grown by 50 percent since February. To meet the needs of this “new normal” the pandemic has brought on, MeetElise is launching the beta of a new product that will allow users to have self-guided and virtual tours of the spaces they are interested in.
This latest funding round was led by Navitas Capital and will be used to expand MeetElise’s offering to small and midsize property management firms. The company is also growing its team, with open roles across its engineering, customer success, marketing and sales departments.
