The Proptech Wars: EliseAI and Funnel Square Off

“We finally get tech that moves the needle, and now the kids are fighting,” a multifamily operator told me late last year.

Multifamily proptech has never been a particularly exciting space. For years, point solutions scraped together a living on the fringes of the real estate tech ecosystem, fighting for the scraps of technology budgets the property management systems considered too marginal or cumbersome to capture. These startups, by and large, lived at the whim of those same PMS platforms who could cut off integrations and shut them down at the first whiff of a serious competitive threat.

But in recent years the landscape has begun to shift. Companies like EliseAI, Bilt, and Funnel achieved the kind of critical mass, momentum, and valuations previously reserved for PMS platforms themselves. In doing so, they began to encroach on property management systems’ historical turf: CRM (Funnel) and payments (Bilt), for instance.

So it’s no surprise that as the stakes have risen, elbows have gotten sharper. And in recent months, two proptech darlings—Elise and Funnel, each of which serve millions of multifamily units—have been locked in a standoff, to the growing concern of multifamily operators who rely on both platforms. It’s a standoff that represents two distinct visions of how multifamily operations will evolve over the next decade.

The Battle Lines

EliseAI and Funnel were not historically competitive. EliseAI—founded in 2017 as MeetElise by software engineers Tony Stoyanov and Minna Song—used nascent AI technology to handle out-of-hours leasing inquiries. Funnel, on the other hand, sought to build an entirely new CRM designed for centralized operations. 

Both companies were ahead of their time. AI and centralization were both fringe concepts in the mid-2010s that have since become the two most important trends in multifamily operations. And Funnel and Elise have both translated their prescience into fundraising success: Funnel won the backing of RET Ventures and a $32 million Series B in 2023 while Elise closed a behemoth $250 million Series E at a $2 billion valuation last year. And both companies have seen significant adoption in the multifamily market; Funnel is used by 9 of the top 15 operators with more than 1.5 million units on the platform while 24 of the top 25 owners use at least one Elise product.

A number of owners, of course, use both.

And until recently, there was little friction between them. Funnel’s mission was to build a better CRM designed for centralization from the ground up, replacing RentCafe’s building-specific silos. Elise, on the other hand, aimed to automate resident communication through AI. While Elise started with leasing, its platform quickly expanded to include a wide variety of resident communications from basic customer service requests to delinquency and collections. Operators on both platforms saw no conflict: Funnel was where humans managed leasing prospects while Elise handled the automated conversations at the top of the funnel. The platforms integrated, and data flowed in both directions.

But starting about a year ago, things got complicated.

On one side, Elise put more emphasis on its own CRM tool, EliseCRM, which enabled Elise customers to visualize and manage their full leasing funnel within the Elise interface. While gathering information on customers had always been a part of Elise’s product, it now squared off directly against CRM providers like Funnel and RentCafe by promoting the concept of an “AI-first CRM.” As Elise’s Clay Walsh wrote in late 2024:

For property management companies looking to get more out of their tech, switching to an automation-focused CRM frees up your team by automating the manual work that they spend hours wading through every day. Moving off the CRM that your team is accustomed to might sound intimidating, but the benefits of improving leasing conversion rates [...] will pay off in the long run.

Notably, Elise’s CRM was provided for free to all Elise customers.

And on the flip side, Funnel doubled down on its own AI tools. In April 2025, Funnel acquired LeaseHawk’s assets and partnered with white-label AI provider Sierra to launch a suite of AI applications, putting the company in direct competition with Elise’s core product. Funnel’s conversational AI tools are now live in “almost two million multifamily units,” according to the company. Funnel CEO Tyler Christiansen positions the company’s approach to AI as “[operating] inside real operational workflows, not as an agent that takes over decisions in a black box.”

This is not the first time two previously friendly technology companies encroached on each other’s turf. But in this case, it set the stage for trouble ahead—and a proxy battle in a philosophical war for the future of multifamily operations.

Trouble in the Sandbox

In late 2025, Funnel presented Elise with a new integration agreement. Sign it, Funnel threatened, or Elise’s access to Funnel’s CRM could be jeopardized, leaving customers using both platforms in the lurch.