EliseAI deepens vertical operations in housing and healthcare

In their early days of building, co-founders Minna Song and Tony Stoyanov had an AI tool to answer after-hours leasing inquiries for property managers in New York. Since then, their first product has opened the door to go deeper into those workflows and beyond. Today, EliseAI has surpassed $200 million in ARR and now powers one in six apartments across the U.S., partnering with the largest operators in the U.S. and automating the full rental journey—from first inquiry through touring, application, move-in, renewal, maintenance, and collections. With a similar motion underway in healthcare, Elise is automating the deep, administrative workflows that hold up property management and patient care.

EliseAI’s continued momentum has us thrilled to announce that Bessemer is doubling down on our investment by co-leading the company's $350M financing. We’ve been backing vertical software for two decades, including success stories such as Procore, ServiceTitan, and Toast, among others. The company’s growth is beyond what we’ve seen previously, growing faster in its second act while continuing to accelerate.

Delivering on hard-earned outcomes

Software has always competed for a business’s technology budget as a much less considerable line item next to payroll. But EliseAI is compensated against the work it takes on. ROI shows up where an operator’s pain points concentrate: with answered leads at 2 am, closed renewals, on-time rental payments, and maintenance tickets resolved without a phone tree. The company's 2026 operator survey paints a clear picture of how much of an impact is being made:

• Teams are transitioning people from repetitive work into higher-value roles, rewriting job descriptions around new workflows
• Operators who expected AI to struggle with hardship cases and difficult conversations now rely on it to handle them
• An AI plan has become a requirement in every pitch to owners

The industry has stopped debating whether to use AI, and is now seeking who has mastered it.

Introducing Apollo: velocity that compounds with the customer

EliseAI’s engineering team meets directly with operators every day, and all of the company's products have been co-developed with customers. That proximity to the customer is why the product roadmap continues to widen in the right directions. Elise has grown from a leasing assistant into a full-scale operating platform, treating its release cadence as a streak worth protecting. At Elise Beyond, the team demoed the entire lead-to-lease journey as one connected experience and unveiled Apollo, a universal agent for property management. Apollo flags renewals at risk, diagnoses occupancy problems across a submarket, builds portfolio leaderboards and explains laggards, and even guides maintenance technicians from tickets to root cause.

Applied AI research at the frontier

The company runs one of the most forward-thinking applied research efforts we’ve seen in vertical AI, and all of it points to the end user. The team’s research principle is that owning your intelligence matters, versus simply “renting” that intelligence through a frontier model. Elise fine-tunes open-source models for specific tasks that run faster and cheaper than larger alternatives. The platform then builds its own machine learning systems that turn conversation data into predictions, such as a resident's likelihood of renewing so an agent can take action at the right moment. It also owns the entire voice AI pipeline, tuning noise handling and interruption decisions to how real conversations actually happen. All of which is made possible through rigorous evaluation, constant experimentation, and more customer interactions to learn from than anyone else in the category.

Accelerating the mission

Minna and Tony are in it for the long haul, still answering support tickets themselves on weekends. Among them is one of the densest concentrations of applied AI talent in New York—engineers who turn frontier research into production systems and produce results in real-world scenarios within weeks—with plans to expand their team in San Francisco, as well as Boston, Chicago, Austin, and Toronto. EliseAI operates like a collection of small startups working as one, where everyone is expected to act like a founder by taking ownership beyond their role and moving at pace for a company where most of the work still lies ahead.

As the world becomes more accustomed to AI making our lives faster and easier, housing and healthcare are undeniably part of the equation. EliseAI is positioned to be the intelligence that runs the daily operations of these industries, absorbing more of what operators pay for directly and eventually carrying (and customizing) the same playbook into more vertical spaces. We believe the enduring companies of this era will take on labor budgets, deliver outcomes their customers can measure, and ship faster than anyone around them. Elise is one of the clearest examples of this, and we’re grateful to Minna, Tony, and the rest of the team for letting us go the distance with them.

Discover the latest with EliseAI, or join their team!