Xocean's uncrewed ships offer low-carbon ocean data for offshore wind and hydrography.
The Irish startup has secured $119 million to expand its services.
Check out the 10-slide pitch deck it used to secure the funding.
Xocean, which offers data on the ocean to offshore wind and hydrography operations, has secured $119 million to expand.
The Irish startup, launched in 2017, has developed remotely controlled uncrewed surface vessels (USVs) with built-in sensors that can capture geophysical ocean data.
Users monitor and control the USVs through the startup's CyberDeck cloud platform, which also analyzes the quality of the data being collected. This data can give insights into seafloor topography and the sediments that make up the ocean floor.
Xocean's clients include BP, Shell, and SSE Renewables.
"We are providing this service for many of the world's largest energy companies, supporting the development of clean, renewable energy globally," founder and CEO James Ives said in a statement announcing the $119 million investment.
The transition to cleaner energy has been a central topic of discussion as companies race to find renewable sources of energy — such as wind and nuclear — to power the AI boom.
The startup partnered with climate investment firm S2G Ventures to structure the $119 million round, which was backed by S2G, Climate Investment, and Morgan Stanley's 1GT climate fund, among others.
The company said it would use the capital injection to expand its geographical footprint and accelerate product innovation.
Check out the 10-slide pitch deck used to secure the fresh funding.
In April last year, the Environmental Protection Agency released its latest attempt to regulate the carbon emissions of power plants under the Clean Air Act. It's something the EPA has been required to do since a 2007 Supreme Court decision that settled a case that started during the Clinton administration. The latest effort seemed like the most aggressive yet, forcing coal plants to retire or install carbon capture equipment and making it difficult for some natural gas plants to operate without capturing carbon or burning green hydrogen.
Yet, according to a new analysis published in Thursday's edition of Science, they wouldn't likely have a dramatic effect on the US's future emissions even if they were to survive a court challenge. Instead, the analysis suggests the rules serve more like a backstop to prevent other policy changes and increased demand from countering the progress that would otherwise be made. This is just as well, given that the rules are inevitably going to be eliminated by the incoming Trump administration.
A long time coming
The net result of a number of Supreme Court decisions is that greenhouse gasses are pollutants under the Clean Air Act, and the EPA needed to determine whether they posed a threat to people. George W. Bush's EPA dutifully performed that analysis but sat on the results until its second term ended, leaving it to the Obama administration to reach the same conclusion. The EPA went on to formulate rules for limiting carbon emissions on a state-by-state basis, but these were rapidly made irrelevant because renewable power and natural gas began displacing coal even without the EPA's encouragement.
Vishwas Prabhakara, left, Georgianna W. Oliver, center, and Alex Israel, right, lead some of the buzziest real-estate tech startups in the country.
Courtesy of HoneyHomes, Tour24, Metropolis.
Real-estate tech startups aim to make tasks from property management to homebuying more efficient.
We surveyed 10 venture capitalists to identify the hottest proptech companies of the year.
Some of the firms are modernizing real estate by digitizing analog processes, sometimes using AI.
The frozen housing market meant tough times for the proptech — or property technology — industry.
As the market starts to thaw, however, things are looking up for firms that seek to use technology to digitize, automate, or otherwise improve legacy processes in the worlds of residential and commercial real estate.
Business Insider asked 10 venture-capital investors who focus on real-estate and construction technology to nominate the most exciting, promising, and talked-about proptech startups in 2024.
The 20 companies on the final list reveal the breadth of the proptech universe.
Take Steadily, a firm trying to digitize insurance underwriting for real-estate investors, a process that has historically taken a lot of paperwork and time — only to result in policies with steep premiums. Another startup, Arcol, aims to make producing 3D architectural drawings faster and easier. A third, Conservation Labs, uses an AI-powered sensor to detect if water is leaking or being wasted in a building to prevent damage and protect the environment.
In the first half of 2024, venture funding for proptech companies dropped 14.3% from the same period a year prior. Funding totaled $4.37 billion, down from $5.1 billion during the same period in 2023 and dramatically less than the $13.13 billion invested in the first six months of 2022, according to the Center for Real Estate Technology & Innovation (CRETI), which surveyed 1,088 proptech startups.
Certain niches, however, hold promise. In 2024, VC investments in AI-powered proptech companies reached a record $3.2 billion, CRETI reported earlier this month.
Here are 20 of the buzziest proptech companies in 2024, presented alphabetically. The companies' fundraising numbers are from PitchBook to ensure a consistent data source.
Did we miss a company you think is disrupting the industry? Send reporter Jordan Pandy an email at [email protected].
Agora
City: New York City and Tel Aviv
Year founded: 2019
Total funding: $64.31 million
What it does: Agora is a financial software firm that helps real-estate investors process payments, keep track of tax records, raise money, and generally organize data.
Why it's hot: The firm, which raised a $34 million Series B round in May, said it helps landlords and developerswith much-needed modernization.
"Real estate is the largest asset class in the world. However, the market still relies on legacy software providers, inefficient workflows, outdated, fragmented systems, and manual, tedious work," Asaf Raz, Agora's head of marketing, told Business Insider.
"Investors expect a digital-first experience — they're tech-savvy and need access to information quickly. Firms can't work without it, and clients need a platform like Agora more than ever," Raz said.
A challenge it faces: Real-estate investors are still grappling with relatively high interest rates, which makes it harder to borrow money and scale up, and the relatively high price of materials, which makes it tougher to renovate or upgrade properties. Those market forces could make customers more reluctant to spend money on new software.
Agora CEO Bar Mor told business news site Pulse 2.0 earlier this month, however, that Agora might still appeal to customers because its suite of products could help them "enhance efficiency and save costs."
Arcol
The team behind Arcol, which allows architects to build and work together on 3D models.
Acrol
City: New York
Year founded: 2021
Total funding: $5.1 million
What it does: Arcol is a webbrowser-based design tool predominantly used by architects to create and collaborate on 3D models of buildings and explore their feasibility.
Why it's hot: Architects — Arcol's target audience — have traditionally relied on software design tools like AutoCAD and Revit, which require paid licenses and aren't as collaborative. Arcol has set out to solve that issue with a browser-based format easily shared and edited by anyone involved in a building project.
"These people are core to our society; they're literally building the built world, yet they hate using their tools," said Paul O'Carroll, the son of an architect and founder of Arcol. "The design tool we use to design buildings, we want to rethink for the browser to be collaborative and to be performant."
So far, demand is high.Arcol, run by a team of six, has a waitlist of over 18,000 users, O'Carroll said.
A challenge it faces: There are several other startups in the BIM, or Business Information Modeling, space. Competing with established players like Revit could take a lot of time and money, according to AEC Magazine. (AEC stands for architecture, engineering, and construction.)
Also, Arcol is currently only useful to architects during the conceptual modeling phase, and the company hopes to expand the tool to help with other stages of construction.
Branch Furniture
From left, Branch Furniture's Verity Sylvester, Greg Hayes, and Sib Mahapatra.
Branch Furniture
City: New York City
Year founded: 2018
Total funding: $11.76 million
What it does:Branch Furniture sells office products, like chairs and desks, to businesses and directly to consumers.
Why it's hot: The company's first iteration sold office furniture the old way: B2B,catering to employers outfitting a huge space who would often purchase items in bulk. After the pandemic changed how (and how often) workers occupied offices, Branch pivoted to sell to regularpeople — wherever they work.
"We launched our D2C business to cater to the future of work, which was definitively hybrid, both during COVID and after — and that's where we sit today," Sib Mahapatra, cofounder of Branch Furniture, told Business Insider.
Branch's ergonomic chair is a bestseller with a 4.6 rating out of five with over 6,000 reviews — it's rated among the best in its category by Business Insider, Architectural Digest, and Wired for its adjustability and sleek design.
In addition to desk chairs — in colors that range from a standard black to salmon-y orange hue called "poppy," the company also sells desks and lamps to outfit a home office. Its inventory includes meeting tables and even phone booths ($6,395) for more commercial office spaces.
A challenge it faces: Branch's products are physical, so it's been plagued by supply-chain delays. Branch is also up against competitors in the good-looking-furniture-that-is-also-comfortable arena, including Herman Miller and Steelcase — though Branch's offerings are often cheaper.
The company is also gaining ground regarding velocity, or the speed at which new products are developed and released.
"We're learning a lot about the pace of iteration in our product category," Mahapatra said. "It's definitely not software, but the benefit is that you get more time to really get things right and to iterate with purpose, and you end up being a little bit more deliberate about how you iterate the product — it just takes longer."
BuildCasa
BuildCasa cofounders Ben Bear, left, and Paul Stiedl.
BuildCasa
City: Oakland, California
Year founded: 2022
Total funding: $6.67 million
What it does:BuildCasa helps California homeowners subdivide their lots — thanks to new state laws — and then connects them with local builders who pay the homeowners for a portion of their land and then build new housing on it.
Why it's hot: The national housing crisis is particularly acute in California, which recently passed a series of laws to encourage more building. While others look to transform construction to make cheaper housing, BuildCasa uses technology instead to find more buildable lots in desirable locations like San Francisco and San Jose.
Most massive home-building companies focus on large, master-planned communities, often far from city centers. BuildCasa's vision, said its founders Ben Bear, CEO, and Paul Stiedl, CPO, is to become a large homebuilder focused instead on finding land in already desirable cities and suburbs.
The company works with homeowners to subdivide their land, creating a new, buildable lot. Those lots can then be sold to a local real-estate developer to build on, or BuildCasa can work in partnership with a local builder to erect and then sell a completed home.
A challenge it faces: New laws have simplified the process of subdividing lots, but building in infill areas still requires technical expertise and good relationships with local officials. Building on these smaller lots may be becoming easier, but it still isn't easy.
Conservation Labs
Conservation Labs founder and CEO Mark Kovscek.
Conservation Labs
City: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Year founded: 2018
Total funding: $14.68 million
What it does: Conservation Labs developed a smart water sensor that can identify leaks and wasteful water use. The H2know sensor uses machine learning to decode sounds in water pipes and translate them into insights for commercial property owners, including restaurants and hotels.
Why it's hot: The startup is at the intersection of two buzzy topics:AI and sustainability. H2know trains on thousands of hours of water pipe acoustics so that, over time, it becomes more accurate in detecting leaks and inefficient water use in buildings. Customers use that information to fix problems and conserve water, saving them money on utility bills while lowering their overall carbon footprint. Some 20% of home energy use goes to heating water.
"There's a very strong relationship between net-zero carbon emissions and water consumption," said Mark Kovscek, founder and CEO of Conservation Labs.
He added that H2know has detected leaky toilets in nearly every building in which it's installed. Some large properties are wasting 1 million gallons of water a year, he said.
Kovscek said the goal is to scale up to 100,000 sensors installed as soon as possible, or five times what Conservation Labs is currentlyon track to sell this year. To support that growth, the company needs to hire some of the "best and brightest" data scientists and engineers to further develop the machine-learning platform that underpins H2know, Kovscek said.
Constrafor
Constrafor cofounders CTO Douglas Reed, left, and CEO Anwar Ghauche.
Constrafor
City: New York
Year founded: 2019
Total funding: Almost$380 million
What it does: Large general contractors use Constrafor's software to onboard and pay their subcontractors on time — sometimes before the contractors themselves get paid by the clients. Contractors can also use the software to help purchase the supplies and services needed to complete a construction project on time and within budget.
Why it's hot: There's the money raised. In November, Constrafor announced that it raised $14 million in Series A funding as well as a $250 million credit facility.
The issues the firm is trying to address are also key. Construction is booming across the US, thanks in part to President Joe Biden's $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill. The rise of AI is also leading to a corresponding increase in the construction of data centers.
The actual process of construction, however, can often be long and complicated. That's why Constrafor's role as a one-stop shop appeals to large general contractors.
"So far, everyone has been focused on just building a very, very small point solution," said Anwar Ghauche, Constrafor's founder. "We're combining multiple different workflows, multiple different departments, all on the same platform."
The main challenges it faces: Next up:Constrafor must try to convince subcontractors to subscribe and pay for its software, too.
Gauch added that Constrafor's contractor clients can face cash-flow crunches. Those can lead to delays on important projects.
After Hurricanes Helene and Milton severely damaged parts of Florida, North Carolina, and other parts of the Southeast, Constrafor launched a disaster relief effort that would allow local contractors who are part of rebuilding efforts "to overcome delays, purchase materials, and ensure timely payment for their teams."
Ease Capital
Ease Capital's Ryan Simonetti, Guillermo Sanchez, and Charlie Oshman.
Ease Capital
City: New York
Year founded: 2022
Total funding: $13.95 million
What it does: Ease Capital helps private equity firms and large investors lend to smaller apartment landlords. It uses data and technology that allow the biggest players to lend $5 million to $50 million in deals that would typically be too small for them.
Why it's hot: Sophisticated private lenders usually focus on the largest apartment complexes, meaning that most apartment-building owners have to turn to banks and agencies to borrow money to purchase or refinance properties. However, current high rates have dramatically slowed bank and agency lending and the large private lenders usually won't lend for small—and medium-sized projects.
Ease uses data and technology to make it easier and more efficient for these large lenders to lend on smaller deals when the need is the highest. In 2023, the company announced a $450 million partnership with major real estate owner and asset manager Taconic Capital Partners, and has already announced multiple successfully originated loans.
CEO Charlie Oshamn told Business Insider earlier this year that the company is often seeing up to $1 billion in loan requests a month. Unlike other firms, which provide an estimated rate upfront that could potentially change over months of negotiation, Ease Capital sticks to its initial offering, eliminating the guessing game for potential clients.
A challenge it faces: Though the founding team has successfully launched other major proptech businesses, like flexible office and event space provider Convene and real-estate data firm Reonomy, it still needs to prove itself as a lender.
Habi
Brynne McNulty Rojas, CEO and cofounder of Habi, left, and Sebastian Noguera Escallon, president and cofounder.
Habi
City: Colombia and Mexico
Year founded: 2019
Total funding: $564 million
What it does: Habi has built Latin America's largest proprietary database and utilizes AI-based pricing algorithms to facilitate transactions and financing for homebuyers and sellers. Habi also buys and sells homes, offers mortgages, and posts and publicizes listings of properties for sale.
Why it's hot: The company operates in Colombia and Mexico without centralized MLS. MLS, or multiple listing services, are databases designed to help real estate brokers identifyavailable homes for sale. These systems are abundant in the US, whereas they are scarce in Latin America. Without an MLS, it means homebuyers and sellers in Colombia and Mexico have difficulty knowing which properties are available for sale, their prices, and their listing and pricing history.
By gathering and sharing information on more than 20 million homes, Habi has addressed a critical need in these countries' real estate sector, establishing itself as an authority on housing in the region.
"We've become a household name for low and middle-income sellers and consumers and brokers in Mexico and Colombia," Brynne McNulty Rojas, CEO and cofounder of Habi, told Business Insider.
A challenge it faces: A combination of factors, including shifting economic and political conditions, has stalled the growth of Latin America's real-estate market. To achieve the same level of ubiquity as Zillow in the US, Habi must get real-estate brokers and sellers to list their properties on its platform and entice buyers to use it.
HoneyHomes
Vishwas Prabhakara, Founder and CEO of Honey Homes
Courtesy of Honey Homes
City: Lafayette, California
Year founded: 2021
Total funding: $21.35 million
What it does: Founder Vishwas Prabhakara envisions Honey Homes as a "primary care physician for your home." For a monthly fee, a dedicated handyman will come once or twice a month to knock off "lightweight" home improvement projects like fixing a leaky faucet, installing a new ceiling fan, or repainting a room.
Why it's hot: With a cooling housing market, Prabhakara believes many homeowners are staying in their homes longer and interested in investing resources in — and enjoying — the property they currently have.
The main challenge it faces: Homeowners who already hire their preferred handymen may not be willing to pay for a service that sends new people, and bigger projects might require more specialized repair professionals. Then there's the cost and current smaller scale of the company:Subscriptions start from $295 a month, or $3,940 a year, according to the company website. The service is only available in parts of San Francisco and the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Orange County, and Dallas, according to the site.
Impulse Labs
Impulse Labs CEO and founder Sam D'Amico.
Impulse
City: San Francisco
Year founded: 2021
Total funding: $25 million
What it does: Impulse Labs made a battery-powered induction cooktop that, unlike most of its competitors, which may require an electrical upgrade, can plug into a standard 120-volt outlet. The cooktop can boil water at lightning speeds, and sensors hold heat levels steady even at high temperatures.
Why it's hot: Impulse Labsfounder Sam D'Amico said the cooktop offers a better cooking experience than gas burners while promoting more climate-friendly homes. Cooking with gas emits pollutants like methane, benzene, and carbon monoxide, which harm our health and the planet. But it can cost thousands of dollars to rewire a home for an electric induction stove. Impulse Labs' induction cooktop avoids those pollutants and the cost of home retrofits.
The battery in Impulse Labs' stove also stores enough power to make three meals if the power goes out, D'Amico said.
"One of the cheapest ways to deploy battery storage is in the appliances we have to buy anyways," he added.
The main challenge it faces: The cooktop costs $5,999. The price is high, D'Amico said, but similar to other premium appliances. The price is lower if buyers qualify for tax breaks and rebates from federal and state governments, as well as some utilities. It's also only a cooktop — not a full stove — but D'Amico said the company eventually wants to sell a suite of appliances that can be a whole-home battery solution. Impulse Labs is accepting pre-orders, with plans to ship in the first quarter of 2025, according to its website.
Keyway
Keyway cofounders CEO Matias Recchia, left, and COO Sebastian Wilner.
KeyWay
City: New York City
Year founded: 2020
Total funding: $43 million
What it does:Keyway uses machine learning and AI to aid institutional investors in sourcing, underwriting, and managing portfolios of properties.
Why it's hot: Companies that use AI have become commonplace today, but Keyway believes it is ahead of the pack in adopting and applying AI technology to real-estate investing.
"We were very early on in the AI game in 2020, and I think we've built a really strong backend of data with lots of APIs that allows us to integrate very segregated data very fast," CEO and cofounder Matias Recchia told Business Insider. "The fact that we built our system in a modular way also allows us to customize our product to a lot of our customers — so it's really not one solution fits all."
The main challenge it faces: New technology like Keyway can be hard to push on seasoned real-estate investors as they're used to using old-school methods like manually sourcing, underwriting, and managing portfolios.
"We're merging two cultures that are very different," Recchia said. "The real-estate industry requires a lot of proof to show them that data can really help them make better decisions. So there's a little bit of a culture shift that we're bringing to real estate as we sell them these tools and we partner with them."
Latii
Latii cofounder and COO Juan Pascual.
Latii
City: Brooklyn, New York
Year founded: 2023
Total funding: $8.82 million
What it does: Latii is a sourcing platform that uses AI-powered tools to help North American-based architects and contractors save up to 60% by connecting with Latin American, southern European, and northern African window and door fabricators.
Why it's hot: Architects often include custom windows and doors in their designs, but hiring contractors and craftspeople overseas can cost their property-owning clients thousands of dollars. The architects who work with Latii, however, can source materials faster and at lower costs, cofounder and CEO Santiago Bueno told Business Insider.
"We're able to produce either equal or higher quality products at a less expensive rate," Bueno said.
In October, Latti announced that it had raised $5 million in seed-round funding, which it will use to expand in the Pacific Northwest, Mountain states, and the New York tri-state area.
The main challenge it faces: When working with fabricators in Latin America, challenges can arise in managing certifications, enforcing warranties, and overcoming language barriers. The region's use of the metric system can also be difficult for North America-based architects to navigate.
Lessen
City: Scottsdale, Arizona
Year founded: 2020
Total funding: $713.8 million
What it does: Lessen's software allows commercial and residential landlords to track maintenance needs, connect with service providers, and buy products.
The valuation preceded a major acquisition in 2023: Lessen spent $950 million to buy property maintenance management firm SMS Assist in what the Commercial Observer called the largest proptech acquisition in history.
Lessen's software is widely used, handling 3 million work orders a year across 250,000 properties, according to Fifth Wall, an investor in the firm. Lessen also launched Lessen Advantage Marketplace, which allows its landlord customers to buy materials like glass, floors, and doors and find better insurance and loan rates.
The main challenge it faces: Like many real-estate firms, Lessen faces an overall slowdown in both the commercial and residential sectors, with mortgage rates remaining elevated. One big potential client base for Lessen is office building owners and property managers, but the office market right now is struggling, with vacancies around the US at record highs.
"We typically grow hand-in-hand with our clients, serving them in additional properties and markets as they expand. So, for example, interest rates can influence growth in some areas of our business," said Michael Tanner, senior vice president of marketing at Lessen.
A dearth of tradespeople is also a challenge for the company's platform that connects them to landlords, Tanner said.
Finally, the firm competes in a crowded market of competitors offering software for landlords, including Stessa, AppFolio, TenantCloud, and more.
Metropolis
Metropolis CEO and cofounder Alex Israel.
Metropolis
City: Santa Monica
Year founded: 2017
Total funding raised by the company: $1.93 billion
What it does: Metropolis uses a computer vision platform powered by artificial intelligence to enable checkout-free payment at parking facilities. After registering their vehicles on the Metropolis app, customers can simply drive in and drive out without the hassle of paying with credit cards or ticket machines.
Why it's hot: Metropolis announced its acquisition of SP Plus, the largest parking network in North America, for $1.5 billion in October 2023 and closed the deal in May 2024. The move allowed Metropolis to rapidly scale its technology and reach 50 million customers across 4,000 locations.
"We've seen success and are continuing to scale and grow because Metropolis' checkout-free experiences give people the gift of time back, so they can spend it on the things that matter the most," cofounder and CEO Alex Israel told Business Insider.
The main challenge it faces: Israel said that most of the parking payments and transactions in the world are still analog.
"We envision a future where checkout-free payments travel with you, but scaling this technology across industries is complicated — it requires remarkable proprietary technology and boots on the ground," he said.
PredictAP
PredictAP CEO and founder David Stifter, left, and president and cofounder Russell Franks, right.
PredictAP
City: Boston
Year founded: 2020
Total funding: $13.17 million
What it does: PredictAP makes real estate invoice processing simple and easy. It uses AI to code invoices quickly.
"So the accounting rules can become very complicated in commercial real estate at big companies," said CEO and founder David Stifter, describing the journey of how an invoice is processed.
He said an invoice would come in first, and someone would need to determine which accounting rules to apply. Predict AP will be useful at this stage because the AI will understand and use the accounting rules correctly. Then, it will go through the rest of the accounts payable process, a department responsible for paying vendors for services or goods at the company. Then, someone will approve it and then pay for it.
Why it's hot: Predict AP serves every corner of the real estate sector. The company said its customers are publicly traded companies that own real estate, private companies that own and operate real estate, or customers who provide services for those big companies.
The company has been able to help AP specialists and property managers face difficulties entering invoices because it takes a lot of time and effort.
"We're able to help folks with that difficult task of coding invoices and it's particularly painful in real estate where there's a lot of complexity," said CEO and founder David Stifter. He added: "Nobody wants to be typing 15-digit invoice numbers; that's not fun."
Russell Franks, the president and cofounder of Predict AP, added to his comments and noted that Predict AP could process an invoice in 30 to 40 seconds faster than the normal processing time of five to 10 minutes.
The main challenge it faces: The company shared that it is hard to find funding in this tough economy, and it is not easy to grow and expand.
Propexo
Propexo CTO Nikolas Johnson, left, COO Ben Keller, center, and CEO Remen Okorua, right.
Propexo
City: Boston
Year Founded: 2022
Total funding: $7.97 million
What it does: Propexo's unified API, or application programming interface, helps other real-estate tech companies quickly and easily integrate withproperty-management systems.
Why it's hot: Real-estate tech companies use APIs to integrate with data from external sources, like lead generation systems or rent roll systems.
However, existing APIs and the technology around them are outdated.
That means companies lose time and money that could be used to develop their product while trying to integrate with these APIs, said COO Ben Keller.
Propexo's unified API improves the developer experience by making the integration process simpler, faster, and cheaper. "We're really the first engineering infrastructure product in the proptech ecosystem," said Keller.
The main challenge it faces: It's not easy to convince property managers and owner-operators to change how they've been running their businesses for many years.
In August, the Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against RealPage, alleging that the property-management software company allows landlords to coordinate and unfairly keep rents high. This is causing some landlords to rethink how they handle and process information, according to trade publication Multifamily Dive.
Rent Butter
Christopher Rankin, Rent Butter's cofounder and CTO.
Rent Butter
City: Chicago
Year founded: 2020
Total funding: $4 million
What it does: Rent Butter has created an alternative tenant screening process that gives landlords a more comprehensive view of applicants' financial history.
Why it's hot: Landlords have historically relied on static credit reports and background checks when evaluating potential tenants. Doing so creates a barrier for applicants with financial difficulties early in their adult lives, as credit scores are a difficult metric to improve.
Rent Butter is trying to eliminate that barrier and change the narrative around who is a "good" candidate by providing landlords with additional information that can more accurately assess a person's financial reliability.
Their application connects toan applicant's bank account, credit history, and employment, criminal, and rent payment history to provide a detailed one-page report highlighting their financial behaviors and potential risks.
"Our whole approach is: How do we show who the person is today — not who they were seven or 10 years ago," cofounder and CTO Christopher Rankin told Business Insider.
The main challenge it faces: Rent Butter partners with landlords, rather than selling directly to consumers, which makes scaling a challenge. Most landlords already have a tenant-vetting process, so it could be hard to convince them to change to Rent Butter.
Shepherd
Shepherd CTO Mo El Mahallawy, left, CEO Justin Levine, center, and Chief Insurance Officer Steve Buonpane, right.
Shepherd
City: San Francisco
Year founded: 2021
Total funding: $22.27 million
What it does: Shepherd is a Managing General Underwriter (MGU) leveraging tech to make underwriting commercial construction insurance more efficient. It also wields data to create more informed risk selection and price recommendations, often leading to upfront and long-term savings for policyholders.
Why it's hot: Insurers partner with MGUs to provide clients with insurance, with the MGU underwriting policies for clients and selling to potential policyholders. Shepherd adapts the typical MGU model by cutting the underwriting process from weeks to hours and incorporating risk assessment tech into its platform, making it a one-stop shop for insurers and clients. By working faster and putting these services in one place, Shepherd can better serve construction companies and insurers while fostering more involved relationships.
The main challenges it faces: Both insurance brokers and potential clients have some healthy skepticism about a new model for commercial construction insurance, so it falls on Shepherd to earn their trust to gain their business.
Steadily
Darren Nix, founder and president of Steadily.
Courtesy of Steadliy
City: Austin
Year founded: 2020
Total funding: $60.1 million
What it does: Steadily is a digital insurance company for real-estate investors that promises a "faster, better, and cheaper" underwriting experience.
Why it's hot: Steadily founder Darren Nix first encountered the outdated nature of insurance underwriting, trying to find quotes for his own rental property in Chicago.
Terrible customer service and shockingly high quotes stopped him in his tracks.
"It was like rolling back the clock to the mid-1990s," he told Business Insider. Focusing on selling insurance to real-estate investors has helped Steadily grow to about 140 employees across Austin and Kansas City, Missouri.
In November, Steadily announced it had started to actively write new business on its own insurance carrier. "Nothing says 'we believe in the product we've built' more strongly than underwriting risk as the carrier," Nix said in a statement.
The main challenge it faces: Steadily has started selling insurance to short-term-rental investors, which presents different challenges than underwriting more traditional, longer-term rentals.
The market represents significant growth — accounting for nearly 20% of Steadily's current business — but the pricing is tricker.
"The people coming in and out of those properties don't take care of them at the same level of responsibility," Nix explained. "One of the things that a host can do to demonstrate that they are a good insurance risk is to point to their Airbnb or VRBO history and show that they're a super host, they take great care of their property, they don't host ragers."
Tour24
Tour24 founder Georgianna W. Oliver.
Courtesy of Tour24.
City: Medfield, Massachusetts
Year founded: 2020
Total funding: $20.35 million
What it does: Tour24 is an app that lets prospective tenants take self-guided apartment tours without a leasing agent present.
Why it's hot: In many cities, renting an apartment can be cutthroat, with open-house lines and bidding wars to nab a good unit at a reasonable price.
More than ever, people are deciding on places to live quickly — sometimes even committing before they've even seen the unit because they aren't able to schedule a walkthrough that jives with their working hours.
Tour24 allows users — who are ID- and credit card-verified — to tour apartments when leasing agents aren't available, such as on evenings and weekends.
"We are seeing that certainly millennials really prefer self-guided experience," Georgianna W. Oliver, the founder of Tour24, told Business Insider.
Oliver said many of their leasing-agency clients offer Tour24's self-guided tours as well as leasing agent-led tours and virtual tours — and have given feedback that the more options they give potential renters, the better.
"People have the options," she said. "And they really like having the options."
The main challenge it faces: Since the worst part of the COVID-19 pandemic, many individual leasing agencies have been offering some version of a self-guided tour on their own with their own video Tour24 also competes with other self-guided rental-tour apps like Rently and CareTaker.
Tour24 seems to be holding its own: The startup announced in October that it raised $5 million in a Series B round, noting that it had doubled in size in 2024 to reach 525,000 units across over 2,060 multifamily properties.
Elisabeth Rizzotti, the cofounder and chief operating officer of Newcleo.
Newcleo
Paris-headquartered Newcleo is developing small modular reactors powered by radioactive waste.
The startup, Europe's only nuclear unicorn, is riding a wave of Big Tech interest in nuclear energy.
Elisabeth Rizzotti, its COO, said the startup will go public after hitting two key milestones.
A three-year-old startup is banking on molten lead and radioactive waste to fuel a nuclear energy renaissance driven by the tech world's demand for abundant and clean power.
Paris-headquartered Newcleo is building small modular reactors, a type of scaled-down nuclear fission reactor assembled in a factory that can be deployed locally at operating plants. It is aiming to capitalize on the frenzy to power energy-intensive AI data centers.
The startup's unique selling point is that its SMRs use molten lead instead of water as a coolant to transfer heat from the reactor core to a power-generating system.
"We're using and reducing what is considered to be a liability and a strong concern for all the governments who have so many deposits of nuclear waste," Elisabeth Rizzotti, the cofounder and chief operating officer of Newcleo, told Business Insider in an interview. "So we also promised to reduce them. And this is a story that really excites people."
Big Tech's push into nuclear has galvanized the startup's efforts. Tech giants such as Google and Amazon have been pivoting to nuclear energy sources to power data centers, which in turn power AI applications. In September, Microsoft announced a deal to help restart Three Mile Island, a nuclear plant infamous for housing one of the most significant nuclear accidents in US history.
Localized nuclear power
Newcleo is one of a handful of companies developing SMRs. Competitors include NuScale, X-Energy, and Rolls-Royce. One appeal of SMRs is that they can be readily transported to industrial sites.
"One of our most relevant business models is supporting the industrial sector, in providing them energy locally," Rizzotti said. "The small models are easily transportable because they're flexible, and you can build them in the factory, so it's very feasible — so there is strong interest from the AI sector, but also wider commercial partners."
She told BI that Newcleo has been approached by other industrial sectors, such as ceramic metal producers, in addition to those in the AI ecosystem.
Securing industrial partnerships is key to Newcleo's growth strategy and fundraising efforts. The startup aims to develop its first prototype by 2026 and operate its first reactor by 2031. Right now, Newcleo is lossmaking, but earlier this year, it hit around $55 million in revenue through its three subsidiaries.
A rendered image of Newcleo's reactor design.
Newcleo
Growth ambitions
In September, Newcleo moved its headquarters from the UK to Paris, which Rizzotti said was to be closer to the French government and support its licensing applications. The move helped Newcleo get selected to be part of the European Industrial Alliance on Small Modular Reactors, an initiative to accelerate the deployment of SMRs.
Despite public and private sector interest, nuclear energy is still seen by some as a risky enterprise due to safety concerns and the hefty upfront cost of building power plants.
Rizzotti acknowledged that Newcleo's investors had a "high risk appetite" — but says Newcleo's place in the circular economy makes it an attractive investment option.
In March 2023, Newcleo announced a bold ambition to raise €1 billion, about $1.04 billion. It's now over halfway to meeting that target, having raised over $560 million in funding from the likes of Pi Campus, Tosto Group, and Viaro Energy since its launch in 2021.
Its future capital-raising strategy will also partially depend on public funds. "At a European level, energy independence is something that we need to consider," Rizzotti said. "It is very important to have a partnership between the public and private, because public investment will reassure private investors."
The startup also sees an IPO as a viable exit option in the future. "Sooner or later, we will start the project of an IPO, so the perspective of being public allows people and investors to have shares of a company that is recognized in the market," Rizzotti told BI. "It is a tangible asset."
While Rizzotti did not have a set timeline for the company going public, she added that it would likely be after the startup achieved a second key milestone after its first prototype in 2026: pre-authorization to build its first reactor in France by early 2027.
"Once we obtain these two milestones, in our opinion, we could be ready to go public," she told BI. "Otherwise, we will continue to raise money through more natural channels like private equity or venture capital."
Madeleine White recently relaunched her pajama brand after criticism.
Madeleine White
Madeleine White's pajama brand faced backlash over pricing and material quality.
She took the website down and relaunched it seven months later with higher quality and lower prices.
White told BI building back trust with her audience is the most important thing for her.
Madeleine White learned what happens when your brand is a huge miss with your fans the hard way.
When she launched her pajama brand, See You Tomorrow, in May, White was thrilled because designing fashion was all she ever wanted.
But the launch went awry. Fans didn't like the price point or the materials used in many of the garments, leading to cries that White was out of touch and had lost the authenticity she had grown her millions of followers for.
"It was always a dream starting my own business," White told Business Insider. "But I could not have been prepared for how difficult it's been.
A clothing launch backfires
White started making content after she lost her job during the COVID-19 pandemic and decided to learn how to use a sewing machine.
Using her decade of experience in modeling, White became known for sharing thrifting videos and industry insights.
On Instagram, she now has 1.6 million followers, and on TikTok, she has 4.7 million.
But after See You Tomorrow launched, fans lamented that she'd forgotten her roots.
White's aim was always to create a brand that would resonate with her followers: one that wasn't budget or fast fashion but also wasn't high-end and unaffordable.
But while things started off well with over half a million visitors on the website, customers felt See You Tomorrow fell short on price point and quality.
"I feel like her original fan base have nothing in common with her current ventures," one said on the InfluencerSnark subreddit.
Under one Reddit post showing a $145 pajama set, customers said they weren't too eager about the price or the materials.
"They're cute, and I've been trying to focus on a smaller but more quality wardrobe, so the price didn't immediately turn me off," one said. "$145 for 100% polyester is absolutely insane though."
"She should get backlash for this, because choosing fast fashion materials but selling it at a high-end price is wild," wrote another. "Were this made from cotton satin or even a cotton silk voile it would be worth it. It would be sustainable."
White told BI she was aware of the complaints immediately and decided to take action. She took the site down and started rethinking the entire brand.
"We went back to the drawing board after a couple of days," she said. "I decided that unless I could fix most of these concerns that people had and really give it a proper shot, then it wasn't really worth continuing the business."
Madeleine White immediately acted when fans didn't like her clothing brand launch.
See You Tomorrow
7 months later
White didn't want to make any announcements while things were in flux, which was hard to do with so many fans eager to know what was happening.
Seven months later, in December, See You Tomorrow relaunched with new, higher-quality pieces and lower prices.
"I decided to bet on myself and put my money where my mouth is and to create the product that I wanted to make," she said. "I trusted my instincts that something wasn't right and that we could do better — and we are doing better."
White had to find new manufacturers and pay for everything herself. She said that though it was hard, she's glad she took that leap of faith.
"I felt like it would be so much more powerful to my audience if I could prove to them that I actually cared about their opinions and I cared about that feedback," White said.
"It's easy to say, I'm so sorry, I fucked up," she added. "But it's much better to say I'm so sorry, I fucked up, and here is how I fixed it."
Madeleine White relaunched See You Tomorrow 7 months after an initial flop.
See You Tomorrow
White told BI that the last few years have been a mad rush because she was so eager to start her own brand. In hindsight, she would have spent longer researching what she wanted to do and not taken the first offer that came along, she said.
"It was definitely an eye-opener," she said.
Trust is everything
White posted a TikTok this month explaining everything. She said what was most important to her out of everything was building trust again with her audience.
It seemed to pay off, with followers thanking her for her transparency and applauding her for listening to their concerns.
White said she doesn't care if she sells one product or a thousand with this new launch — she just wants to repair her relationship with her supporters.
"I've definitely learned just how badly launching a brand that people don't like can hurt your public image," she said. "It just goes to show how important it is for us as people with large followings to do things right."
She said she's also learned that people are happy to pay for quality as long as they know how a price point was reached.
White said influencers are held to a high standard, but ultimately, she sees that as a good thing.
"It just makes the brand better," she said. "I've learned so much, and I've definitely learned not to put my name on anything until I'm 100% happy with it."
The Equatic engineering team at the company's development plant in Los Angeles.
Stella Kalinina for Business Insider
Startups like Equatic and Climeworks develop ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Carbon removal helps businesses meet ESG goals and offset emissions through a carbon credits system.
This article is part of "Transforming Business," a series on the must-know leaders and trends impacting industries.
Out on a barge in Los Angeles, a team of engineers is hard at work tweaking the designs of a collection of machines withmultiple tubes attached to tanks filled with air and different minerals.
The team works for a startup called Equatic, which uses a process called sea electrolysis to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Seawater runs through an electrolyzer, which separates the water into an acid and a base. Rock minerals neutralize the acid, and the base mixes with CO2 from the atmosphere. This results in carbonates that can safely return to the ocean.
Carbon removal technologies, like those developed by Equatic, can transform businesses by helping them reduce their legacy carbon footprint. For many companies with environmental, social, and governance goals, investing in carbon removal through the purchase of carbon credits helps them offset their emissions and get closer to their goal of being "net zero." For rapidly developing industries like artificial intelligence that massively consume energy, implementing carbon removal could help offset emissions in the long term.
Equatic uses sea electrolysis to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Stella Kalinina for Business Insider
The idea of Equatic emerged in the research labs at the University of California, Los Angeles, with a team led by its cofounder Gaurav Sant, a sustainability professor at the school.
Sant said that his team began thinking about how to activate and expand the capacity of oceans, which already naturally absorb CO2 from the atmosphere. Processes such as sea electrolysis have been used for decades, though scaling ocean carbon removal technology has started only in the past few years. Sant said his experience as a cement chemist helped him consider ways to reduce carbon emissions.
"There was very little attention that was being paid truthfully to reducing the carbon intensity of cement production and concrete construction," Sant said. "The journey started with low-carbon cement and low-carbon concrete, and from there, it sort of went into a bunch of other things."
For startups that want to break into the industry and market their product's integrity, they must make carbon removal measurable. At the development plant in Los Angeles, Equaticengineers measure the machinery's ability to remove carbon and produce hydrogen. They then quantify carbon removal results. They also publish their findings in peer-reviewed scientific research papers.
Equatic uses minerals to neutralize the byproducts of the electrolyzer.
Stella Kalinina for Business Insider
Equatic is developing the world's largest ocean-based carbon removal plant in Singapore, a demonstration project in partnership with the country's National Water Agency. The plan for the new plant is to remove 4,000 tons of CO2 annually and create 300 kg of carbon-negative hydrogen a day, according to its website. If these projects succeed, Equatic intends to take its idea to a commercial scale.
For Climeworks, a Zurich carbon removal startup, scaling has taken place gradually over the past fifteen years. The company uses direct air capture technology at its plants to suck CO2 out of the air and then later mineralize it into a solid rock form and store it underground.
"What carbon removal can offer to businesses is making sure that CO2 in the atmosphere, or climate in general, is not a barrier to growth," Jan Wurzbacher, the CEO of Climeworks, said.
The carbon credits market has shortcomings
Carbon dioxide gets converted into carbonates, which can be safely put back into the ocean.
Stella Kalinina for Business Insider
While these companies plan to scale commercially, startups like Equatic sell carbon credits to businesses and individuals who want to reduce their carbon footprint. Two of Equatic's customers are Boeing and Stripe. Climeworks counts Microsoft, Boston Consulting Group, and Shopify as clients.
The carbon credits market is highly unregulated, dotted with stories of credits sold but followed by incomplete actions and scams. An investigation by The Washington Post found that some carbon credit ventures reaped profits from protected public lands in the Brazilian Amazon forests and failed to share profits with locals. Essentially, these ventures gave the impression that they would reduce emissions but used lands they had no rights to, possibly invalidating the credits they said they would offset for companies such as Netflix, Salesforce, and Boeing.
"Some 'cheaper' carbon credits that you can buy are not easily verifiable," said Indroneil Ganguly, an environmental and forests sciences professor at the University of Washington.
Critics of carbon credits argue that this system allows businesses to continue polluting. Some businesses, such as Occidental Petroleum, invest in carbon removal and use the process to extract more fossil fuels. While telling businesses to cut emissions would be ideal, Wurzbacher said that cutting them entirely or converting to more sustainable practices could be costly and not immediate.
Carbon removal can be expensive
Stella Kalinina for Business Insider
Even at the rapid scaling rate of these carbon removal startups, their emissions removal is only a small drop in the sea. In 2022 alone, the global aviation industry emitted 800 megatons of CO2. In comparison, Climework's first commercial plant in Iceland, called Orca, can remove 4,000 tons a year, the company says. Climeworks said its larger Mammoth plant would be able to remove 36,000 tons.
The biggest hurdle for carbon removal startups like Equatic and Climeworks is cost. A plus side of Equatic's sea electrolysis process is that it creates hydrogen, which can be used as a clean energy source and lower the technology's costs.
"So you push the price down, right, and that's what stimulates the market," Edward Sanders, the CEO of Equatic, said.
What's more, carbon removal is a voluntary purchase and an elastic good, meaning that it depends on the desire of individuals or businesses to participate, and the demand can shift significantly with price.
"The way in which we are going to get the necessary volumes is going to be at a price point they can accept and still manufacture the goods they are making and clear the services they do," Sanders said.
The cost to permanently remove 1 ton of CO2 right now is between $600-$1,000. Scaling up existing technology requires more laborers and building very specific machinery, Wurzbacher said. Both Climeworks and Equatic have received grants from the US Department of Energy, including a grant for Climeworks to subsidize its expansions in Louisiana and Texas.
Climeworks uses direct air capture to suck out carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Climeworks
This year, Climeworks expanded beyond permanent carbon removal and began offering a new solutions branch of its business. If the direct air capture method is too expensive for customers, Climeworks finds a portfolio of other options they can use, such as reforestation and biomass storage.
The incoming Trump administration raises questions about the future of carbon removal and whether companies will be motivated to cut emissions.
Both Climeworks' and Equatic's respective CEOs said that while timelines and execution could change, these solutions still had bipartisan support and political momentum. Also, carbon removal itself is inherently adaptive.
"The nice thing about direct air capture," Wurzbacher said, "is that you can basically do it anywhere in the world and have your customers at a very different place."
The Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday said California can go ahead with its ban on the sale of new gas-powered cars by 2035. The approval is an attempt to safeguard the state's strict limits on tailpipe pollution from Trump's promise to revoke them and roll back other federal incentives for electric vehicles.
The stakes are high for automakers because what happens in California can dictate companies' broader EV strategies and the pace of the country's shift away from fossil fuels. The state accounts for some 11% of the US auto market and is also the top EV market in the country. In the first half of 2024, EVs and hybrids accounted for nearly 40% of sales in California.
On top of that, 11 other states and Washington D.C. have adopted rules similar to California's as they seek to reduce the country's largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. The rules require automakers to sell a growing number of zero-emissions vehicles over time. In 2026, at least 35% of new cars, pickup trucks, and SUVs must be electric in California and five other states, while other states' targets kick in in 2027.
Automakers largely support easing emissions regulations
While Trump will face legal challenges in trying to roll back California's rules, he could find some automakers on his side.
The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a lobbying group representing most new vehicle manufacturers in the US, has already asked Trump to ease emissions regulations but keep federal tax incentives that keep EVs affordable.
John Bozzella, president of the alliance, said Wednesday that the waiver was an expected development and the Trump administration will likely revoke it next year.
"We've said the country should have a single, national standard to reduce carbon in transportation," Bozzella said in a statement. "But the question about the general authority of California to establish a vehicle emissions program – and for other states to follow that program – is ultimately something for policymakers and the courts to sort out."
Trump, some Republican lawmakers, and groups linked to fossil fuel interests have repeatedly attacked EVs on the campaign trail, falsely claiming that Americans would be forced to abandon their gas-powered vehicles.
Those attacks come as the EV market deals with a marked slowdown in demand, forcing many companies to reasses their long-term plans for battery-powered cars and, in some cases, add more hybrids to the mix. A pullback in production has made it harder for many companies to meet long-term emissions requirements. Automakers including General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis have laid off thousands of workers.
Auto market analysts, environmental lawyers, and policy experts told Business Insider that they expect the shift to zero-emissions vehicles to continue regardless of who's in the White House — albeit at a slower pace if Trump and Congress overturn tax incentives to buy EVs and investments in charging infrastructure.
"Whatever the Trump administration does this time, automakers' concerns about stability will come up again because all of these manufacturers have said zero-emissions vehicles are the future," Sean Donahue, an attorney who's represented the Environmental Defense Fund in litigation over California's emissions waiver, said.
He added that there's pressure from regulators in other countries to address the climate crisis. US automakers also don't want to fall far behind competitors in countries like China, where affordable EVs have taken off.
California looks to 'Trump-proof' its regulations
Even if Trump does revoke California's emissions waiver, Gov. Gavin Newsom is already trying to "Trump-proof" the state, including its EV and climate policies.
Newsom said he would restore rebates for consumers who buy EVs if Trump ends the federal $7,500 tax credits enacted in the Inflation Reduction Act. This month, the state's energy commission approved a $1.4 billion investment in EV charging and hydrogen fuel stations over the next four years. The commission said the funding could help build nearly 17,000 new public chargers for passenger vehicles — on top of the 152,000 available now.
Newsom also convened a special legislative session to bolster California's defenses against Trump's attacks. Lawmakers could pass $25 million in new funding for the California Department of Justice so the state can file litigation against the Trump administration. That will likely happen if Trump revokes the state's tailpipe pollution waiver.
Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the Trump transition team, said that Trump plans to stop what he says are attacks on gas-powered cars.
"When he takes office, President Trump will support the auto industry, allowing space for both gas-powered cars AND electric vehicles," she said in an email.
Ann Carlson, a professor of environmental law at the University of California at Los Angeles, told Business Insider that she expects the Trump administration to face an uphill legal battle.
She said the EPA has approved California's authority to set strict rules for tailpipe pollution for decades because the state's air quality is so bad. Otherwise, areas including Los Angeles and the Central Valley wouldn't comply with federal air pollution laws and could be penalized.
"The sanction is the withholding of federal highway funds," Carlson — who recently served as chief counsel to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration — said. "It's quite draconian. So California has a pretty good argument that it needs these waivers to meet federal law."
The Supreme Court last week agreed to consider a lawsuit that oil and gas producers filed against the EPA over its waivers allowing California to set stricter limits on tailpipe pollution than the federal government. However, SCOTUS will only decide whether fossil fuel makers have standing to sue over what they say is bureaucratic overreach and won't consider whether California's waiver is legal.
James Di Filippo, a principal policy analyst at the research firm Atlas Public Policy, said automakers will likely continue to walk back their EV investments while the legal battles play out. Companies could seek another compromise with California to restore more certainty as they plan new vehicle models for years to come.
"If they're uncertain about a regulatory outcome, they'll default to a less intense push," he said.
