EliseAI raises $350M after crossing $200M ARR, now serving 20% of the US apartment market

Speaker 1: Congrats

Speaker 16: Great to meet you guys. Thank you so much.

Speaker 2: Have a great rest of your day. Cheers. We'll talk to you soon.

Speaker 1: Take egg.

Speaker 2: Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco. Our next guest is already in the waiting room. We have Minna Song from Elise AI, the cofounder and CEO. Minna, welcome back

Speaker 1: Welcome back.

Speaker 2: Show. How are you doing?

Speaker 17: I'm doing great.

Speaker 2: You raised some money?

Speaker 17: We we did. We raised 350,000,000.

Speaker 1: Just another day. Minna.

Speaker 17: Think we should grow

Speaker 2: to huge growth to 200,000,000 ARR. How how did you get there? What's driving the growth?

Speaker 17: Yes. We we passed 200,000,000 ARR earlier this year. We're really, it's coming from serving more customers in the housing industry and the health care industry. So we've developed a lot of new products for our customers and I we just keep building as quickly as possible because there's a lot of problems in the industries we serve.

Speaker 2: What's the secret to onboarding new customers? I mean, both of the categories you described feel fragmented to me. I don't know how many I don't know how power law driven your client base is, but I would imagine that there's a lot of customers in housing that are working on leasing resident communications, the products that you've built. So how do you actually go and reach them, onboard them? What's the flow like these days?

Speaker 17: Yeah. We we work with most of the largest housing providers in the country. Okay. But it is a it is a long tail industry, so there are tons of smaller customers that all need our software and I mean, it's a pretty hands on process. AI is a big transformation of their of their businesses and AI, as you know, can be kind of scary for some people, but but once you show you have to spend a lot of time showing people the benefit of it and then sort of like they they can't go back to doing anything the the way they were doing it before. So it's a it's a bit of a process, but we we try to make it as easy as possible.

Speaker 2: Yeah. What is customer education actual change management look like in an organization? Every company has like a couple early adopters that are probably demoing all the different tools, but there's a lot of people who are like, look, I do things this way. I've there's some newfangled tool. Oh, I got to check that out, but maybe not this week and maybe not next week either. So I imagine that there's a lot of almost marketing and advertising that you need to do even within a client who has already signed to get utilization of the products up. Is that something that you've had to overcome? Has it actually never maybe it's never been a problem, but I'm interested to hear about how you solve that.

Speaker 17: Yeah. I think, you know, AI makes a lot of technology adoption easier. Right? The number of users that ChatGPT got compared to traditional SaaS products Yeah. Was, you know, it was it was just fundamentally different technology to adopt. Yeah. So a lot of what we do when we're implementing our software is making and the change management is is making it really easy to interact with mainly through through chat. How do you talk to it versus having to learn how to click a bunch of buttons like old old systems really. And today we're in we serve 20% of The US apartment market already uses some of our products. So they are it is quite penetrated and they they are pretty familiar with the technology but we just have more and more products coming out every day. We work on really really hard problems with applied AI and to get those to market takes an incredible kind of engineering feat and research team to do so.

Speaker 1: So I imagine that I'm sure that you compete with companies that are that are much more generalist. They're work they have customers in housing and healthcare and like, you know, let's call it 10 other industries. And then I'm also imagine you compete with companies that just do AI for housing or just do AI for healthcare. Talk about the, like, strategy around really focusing on these two core industries. I imagine there's some similarities, but but but should we expect you to add new entirely new categories? Or are the TAMs big enough in both of these, like, key markets that you can just continue to focus?

Speaker 17: I think our TAM is is huge. I mean, housing and health care together are the two two largest sectors there. About 40% of The US GDP and it's really about how much of that you capture within the for the company and how much value do you add to the customers serving those industries. You know, I think we've always leaned into our strengths which is building products and the nice thing is both industries were solving in both industries were solving the exact same problem and it is actually built on the same the same infrastructure and the same and actually building in both industries has taught us a lot and has made our products better for for for one another.

Speaker 2: What are the benefits of being a company founded in 2017?

Speaker 17: You know, I think in industry, particularly serving our industries, they're not the fastest adopting of technology. So, you know, I think we were actually a few years few years early but it actually was the right place at the right time because we took a sort of warm up the market. When we started, people didn't really know what AI stood for and we were really we are one of the first AI applied AI companies serving any vertical. So it was kind of a a a patience game I guess. But I think if we weren't we hadn't started at that time, we wouldn't be in the running. We wouldn't be at the scale that we're at

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 17: To to have the impact.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Should we expect a a rebrand to Elise SI or are you just riding out AI?

Speaker 17: That's possible.

Speaker 2: I think

Speaker 17: that's great idea. Do you wanna be on that?

Speaker 1: No. I I I I think just drop the AI, just Elise.

Speaker 2: Maybe.

Speaker 1: Cleaner. Great to great to catch up. Amazing progress. And come back when you get like 50% market share or penetration into these. Think that's a good Yeah.

Speaker 2: Talk next month. We go.

Speaker 1: Awesome. Have a great Great to catch

Speaker 2: day. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Our next guest is the CEO, interim president and CEO of MongoDB. We have Dev coming on the show for the first time, but he's been CEO before. And what a journey he's been on. Dev, welcome to the show.