The Next Chapter at Inspectify
Historically, I’ve written a “Year In Review” at the end of each year to highlight the accomplishments of our team over the years, but last month something quite significant happened that I’ve decided to take a minute and reflect on where we’ve come from and more importantly, where we are going.
I’m so humbled and proud to share that as of last month, Inspectify hit positive cash flow for the first time in company history. The last seven years have been a rollercoaster to put it lightly, but over the last 18 months, we have hit an inflection point that has resulted in over 350% growth of revenues and culminated with us hitting double digit EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization) margin last month. This milestone makes us “Default Alive”, a premise that was drilled into us during our early days at YCombinator, a time which seems like a lifetime ago. Most importantly, we now have complete control over our path forward and will be even more aggressive in terms of how we grow our offering and expand our market share from here. For my own benefit, I’ve taken the last few weeks to really reflect on the last seven years and by doing so I’ve compartmentalized that journey over three chapters.
Chapter 1: Formation (2019 - 2022)
The first Chapter of Inspectify starts like most early stage tech companies; a lot of trying, a lot of failing and our first taste of product market fit. It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that the first product and business model we built failed in epic fashion. The idea was simple: build great home inspection software, give it away to home inspectors for free to start capturing a massive, proprietary dataset on properties in the country. Our first app, HIA, short for Home Inspections App (yup, I’m THAT good at branding) was a great MVP, but we failed because of distribution. Home inspectors were quick to realize the classic adage that if the product is free, then you are the product. More importantly, we were solution-seeking, not problem-solving. Back to the drawing board we went.
I then reflected hard on my experience at a Flyhomes, where I managed diligence (inspections, appraisals, etc.) for the homes we were buying with our clients. Operationally, I had to build a team of people to simply manage all the vendors, standardize the outputs and ultimately make a decision on the property. Bluntly, it was a major pain in the ass and did not generate any revenue for the business – bingo, that’s my pain point. We quickly built an MVP, signed up multiple customers and started generating revenue in January 2020. I then made a pretty pitch deck and set up 20+ meetings with early stage VCs in Feb 2020… and then the entire country shut down due to the Covid outbreak and all VCs closed their doors to focus on keeping their existing portfolio afloat… impeccable timing on my end.
Somehow over the next two months we were able to convince Brad, Dalton and Aaron at YCombinator to give us a shot and joined the S20 batch. There was just one catch; they made me bring on a technical co-founder given they had so little faith in my coding skills (still slightly offended). Over a 48 hour period and a few convos I was able to convince Denis to take the plunge and join me on this crazy journey; he joined Inspectify on my 33rd birthday, best birthday ever. We iterated even faster during YC on the offering and were able to piece together a seed round in Fall of 2020 and start building out a small team.
Up until that time, we were able to grow modestly through selling to brokerages and various Proptech companies around the real estate transaction. Then, through a friend, I got connected with Invitation Homes and we were introduced to the red hot Single Family Rental industry (SFR). What happened next was our first real taste of product market fit. Over the first six months of 2021 we grew 10X and accepted a term sheet for our Series A from Kurt and the team at Nine Four Ventures; a group that passed on our Seed round, but, true to their word, busted their ass to make intros and help us grow even though they weren’t on the cap table yet. We closed our Series A in late 2021 and proceeded to grow another 250% over the next six months of 2022 and our team ballooned to over 85 team members to keep pace with that growth.
Chapter 2: Reset and Stability (2023 - 2026)
The next Chapter began with something that anyone who was in real estate over the past 5 years knows all too well. In late February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine triggering a stark market sell off, collapsing the venture capital ecosystem overnight while rising inflation spiked to 8% causing the Federal Reserve overnight to begin hiking interest rates. The end result? Our growth stalled and over the next six months our revenue declined by more than 50%. Given the uncertainty in our ability to continue to fund the business, and the overhiring we had done over the past 12 months, we had to let go of a large portion of our team to ensure the company’s survival. This was and continues to be one of my biggest failures as a CEO and fundamentally changed how I’ve thought about growing the business since.
With the company reset, we started clawing ourselves back; doing so by beginning to diversify our customer base which fundamentally changed the direction of the business. In 2023 alone, we launched our first clients in property management, construction lending, and insurance and began building a brand as the platform for any kind of property visit. Up to this point, our vision for the business was purely centered around the real estate transaction and building a sizable business by obtaining Uber-level marketshare, but our diversification dramatically changed that thinking. We actively re-tooled our platform to handle any and all needs of capturing data around real estate and were able to add enough new customers to hold revenues flat year over year in 2023.
While we were rebuilding our customer base in 2023 and into 2024, we also started making significant investments into our operating model to improve efficiencies and learn from our mistakes in 2022. As we expanded customer segments that were higher volume / lower cost property visits (i.e. insurance, mortgage servicing, etc.), it would be critical for us to be able to fulfill inspections at a much lower cost and faster speed. In early 2023, we rolled out Automated Scheduling (AS),, our back office engine to coordinate inspections autonomously. By the end of 2023, 50% of our inspections went through AS, by the end of 2024, we hit 80% of our inspections. Most importantly, entering 2025 we were completing twice as many inspections as we were before the downturn with a third of the headcount on our operations.
We entered 2025 with a strong operational foundation and a large new market to go after. In early 2025, we changed from defense to offense with the acquisitions of Aloft and Joule Homes and, with those, the expansion into two more segments, appraisals / valuations and home energy audits. Over the next six months, we aggressively integrated and retooled the new teams and tech we acquired and finished the year growing nearly 80% in revenue. Additionally, after years of development, we began the rollout of Voxier, our computer vision / AI layer that allowed us to further automate the inspection workflow and objectively improve the quality of the data output.
During that expansion in 2025, we began exploring our next capital raise (Series B) and found the almost blind polarization toward “AI native companies” as a significant threat to our business if we were to be dependent on venture capital over the coming years. In September, we set a target to hit profitability by April of 2026 and do so by growing the top line and improving unit economics with further application of automation through our platform. Since that target was set, we doubled revenue, we grew gross margin nearly 20% (percentage points), and delivered a 12% EBITDA margin in May.
Chapter 3: Building the Human Layer of Real Estate (2026+)
This brings us to today. As I think about the direction we are heading over the next seven years, it is the culmination of everything that has happened over the past seven.
First, let’s start with what is our greatest strength and most important characteristic of our platform. We have built the fastest, most robust, and most efficient platform for capturing physical data on real estate today. For example, we have doubled the number of visits to properties we do per month in the last five months and our SLAs and unit economics have only improved. I’m biased, but I’m bullish that we have by far the best infrastructure for getting someone to and into a property at scale and have never been more confident that we can expand 100X and the system will absorb the demand.
Second, the market size in front of us feels limitless. It’s almost weekly now that we have a new customer use case land on our desk to handle the physical visit to a property. Installing lockboxes for property managers? Sure, let’s figure it out. Inspecting roofs after large catastrophic events for insurance carriers? Easy. Taking marketing photos for real estate listings? Consider it done. What we have found is there is an enormous addressable market for physical visits to real estate and estimate that there are multiple billions of occurrences every year in the US across residential and commercial real estate.
Finally, timing is in our favor. With the rapid adoption of AI over the past two years, the traditional SaaS model has been completely upended and, while I don’t think SaaS is going away by any means, it creates a world where more and more companies are taking a harder look at their workflows and the software they are paying for and asking if they can replace it with something homegrown and bespoke. For us, it creates a massive opportunity to become the connective tissue between our customers' tech stacks and their physical assets. To put it another way, to become the human layer for all real estate asset classes and all stages of a properties lifecycle.
Today marks a new day for Inspectify. One where we can aggressively reinvest our profits back into the platform to accelerate growing market share, product expansion, and development of our team. It’s been a hell of ride over the past seven years and we wouldn’t be here today if not for our team (both current and past) who have grinded through one of the worst five years in real estate, our customers, who continue to put their trust into our platform, and our investors who continue to invest and support us when everyone else was running the other direction.
Since I started this journey in 2019, I’ve acquired a few more grey hairs, a lot more wrinkles, a lot of lessons learned, and exponentially more conviction that we are building a platform that will change how real estate is built, bought, and managed for decades to come.