If you’re interested in renting an apartment in one of Equity Residential’s 300 properties, chances are you’ll soon be chatting with Ella to set up an apartment tour or answer questions about a lease.
But Ella isn’t human. It’s an AI assistant that answers the phones and responds to hundreds of emails around the clock. It’s still sending quick replies after all the humans have gone home, when most inquiries typically come in.
Ella is so helpful that some people don’t realize they’re talking to a bot.
“Customers were calling in asking for Ella and saying, ‘We just love her work ethic.’ They wanted to make sure she was going to get her commission,” says Kristin Hupfer, a senior vice president of customer experience at Equity Residential. The firm discloses that Ella is an AI chatbot the first time it communicates with a person through email, phone or text, Hupfer says.
Ella has been a gamechanger for the Chicago-based property manager, which owns buildings in New York, San Francisco and Seattle. Back in 2018, the firm’s staff struggled to keep up with the influx of hundreds of requests from prospective tenants each week. That in turn meant losing customers to rivals and keeping units idle. Then in 2019, it started working with New York-based EliseAI, the developer of Ella. Now the bot handles 1.5 million texts, emails and phone calls every year, allowing Equity Residential to save $20 million in payroll costs, Hupfer says (no layoffs, she clarifies, just not replacing staff who left). The real estate firm owns two buildings in Jersey City that don’t need a human staff member at all because they can be managed from a nearby community and Ella handles all the administrative tasks.
“Responses were taking up a good three hours a day for our leasing consultants, and I was able to take that right off their plate,” she says.
Today one in six apartments in the U.S. and 90 percent of the country’s largest property managers use EliseAI’s tools to respond to questions about a unit, renew leases and triage maintenance requests. It can even use smart locks to let renters into an apartment for a tour, or determine that a request to fix a broken A/C unit in the summer should be prioritized.
Founded in 2017, EliseAI expanded into healthcare in 2023 to help understaffed and overwhelmed providers. Now thousands of medical offices also use the company’s tools to automate front-desk tasks like billing, prescription refills, scheduling appointments and verifying insurance. “[These] are the two of the largest industries in the U.S. economy and two of the most underserved by technology,” CEO Minna Song says.
For the first two years, the company didn’t raise a single dollar of venture capital—a rarity in today’s cash-flush startup world. In 2019, EliseAI raised a $1.9 million seed round, followed by a slightly larger $6.5 million Series A. The nine-year old company has picked up $400 million in total funding including its $250 million Series E round led by Andreessen Horowitz last August, valuing it at $2.2 billion. EliseAI announced Wednesday it crossed $200 million in annual recurring revenue in May, the equivalent of $16.6 million in revenue that month.
At Dermatology Partners, a dermatology group with 42 locations on the East Coast, Elise’s voice AI agent now answers 500 calls a day. The company pays only when the AI completes a task successfully without escalating it to a human. “Rolling out Elise has afforded us some high quality options after-hours, where we don’t really want to pay a person to sit up all night,” says the group’s COO Andrew Frankel.
The company uses open source models like Alibaba’s Qwen-4B and trains them on domain-specific data. For its housing bots, that includes millions of past conversations, floors plans, apartment layouts, community rules as well as live inventory so it can answer questions about pricing and availability. EliseAI’s healthcare tools are trained on millions of patient interactions and are connected to medical record systems.
For both healthcare and housing, the tools need to navigate a labyrinth of complex regulations and compliance rules, which vary from one jurisdiction to another. For instance, for the 500,000 affordable housing units that use EliseAI, the system must assess what qualifies as income and sensitively communicate with a customer if an application gets denied.
Song cofounded EliseAI with her husband Tony Stoyanov, whom she met during her year abroad at the University of Cambridge. The two started out building an influencer marketing startup and quickly realized it wasn’t a good idea. “We hated it,” Song says. “We were like, ‘This is making the world a worse place, not a better place.’”
They decided to focus on housing instead, as it is one of our largest expenses and a basic fundamental need, Song says. She took a job as a receptionist at a real estate firm in Manhattan to learn the ins and outs of the housing industry and visited dozens of apartment buildings to understand people’s concerns.
Pre-ChatGPT, EliseAI started out with a basic leasing assistant that used early models like GPT-1 and GPT-2 to handle email and text responses. As the models improved, the startup expanded its leasing bot’s abilities to voice calls and more.
Now it has 11 different products across both sectors, including AI-guided apartment tours and tools to follow up when renters don’t pay.
“AI’s promise was to make a better world for us to live in. But who’s actually building that?” she says. “I think we’re a bit far from the hype and the next novel idea and just very grounded in how can we have an impact on the things that are just painful in our day-to-day lives.”
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