Boom raises $15M Series A to bring fintech-style underwriting to rental housing
It was 2020, and the COVID-19 pandemic had just hit. Rob Whiting was trying to help his brothers, both of whom had lost their jobs, find a more affordable rental.
“As I went down the rabbit hole with them to help them on their application journey, I saw a lot of the pain points along the way,” Whiting recalls, “with one brother getting rejected for bad credit, including a mark on his credit report that was actually an error.”
While his brothers eventually found a new place to live, Whiting was struck by the difficulties they had in the process. The experience led him to start Austin-based Boom, a startup that is building a leasing operating system for property management.
And today, Boom is announcing it has raised $15 million in a Series A round led by S3 Ventures, which included participation from Mischief VC (a firm co-founded by *Plaid CEO and co-founder Zach Perret) and repeat backers such as Starting Line VC, Company Ventures, and Gilgamesh Ventures, among others. It has now raised $20.5 million since its 2020 inception.
The Series A also adds to Boom’s ties to the fintech industry. William Hockey, co-founder of Plaid and founder and CEO of Column, was Boom’s largest investor in its pre-seed round. Dustin Moring, general partner at Mischief, is the former head of product at Cash App and served as a partner on the deal.
Indeed, Boom began with a distinctly fintech-focused product. Its first offering, BoomReport, reports rent payments to the major credit bureaus to help renters build credit. It later launched BoomScreen, an application and underwriting orchestration platform that Boom likens to Alloy’s financial services model.
Now the company is launching BoomCRM, an agentic leasing and touring CRM built on top of that underwriting infrastructure. The product answers calls, qualifies prospective renters, and books tours, while allowing Boom to bring pre-qualification earlier into the leasing process.
Boom’s three products cover different stages of the rental process. By connecting those products, Boom can carry information from one stage to the next and potentially do more with applicants who don't initially qualify, according to Whiting.
Bringing fintech-style underwriting to rentals
Boom operates on the premise that rental screening lags behind underwriting in the consumer lending and credit card spaces.
It’s a somewhat one-size-fits-all approach in that property managers often rely on relatively fixed criteria when evaluating applications, argues Whiting. For example, applicants are often required to earn three times the monthly rent and have a credit score of at least 650. Those rules, he said, rarely bend based on factors such as broader economic conditions or the risk profile of a particular portfolio…