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.
When renters complete pre-screening steps such as verifying their identity, that information can automatically transfer to their actual application. This saves applicants from entering the same details twice.
BoomScreen connects directly to underlying data sources, including county databases, rather than relying only on third parties. That gives property managers more flexibility in deciding which applicant information to consider and how to use it in screening, Whiting says.
Its connected approach could also improve how companies handle rejected applicants. Today, renters who get turned down rarely hear anything back beyond a simple denial. Whiting compares Boom's goal to Credit Karma’s pre-approval tools or Apple’s “Path to Apple Card” program, which give rejected applicants a roadmap of the steps they need to take to qualify later.
Boom has also built compliance, risk and credit infrastructure around the platform. Property managers can be credentialed once with Boom and use multiple FCRA (Fair Credit Reporting Act)-regulated products through the same provider.
BoomCRM moves some of that underwriting infrastructure earlier in the renter journey. Because the CRM sits on top of BoomScreen, Boom can incorporate pre-qualification before a prospective renter formally applies.
Built Specifically for Single-Family and Manufactured Housing
Unlike traditional leasing software, which was designed for large apartment buildings where every unit is in one location, BoomCRM is built specifically for single-family rentals and manufactured housing.
Because these homes are spread out across entire regions and often owned by different investors, BoomCRM includes features such as self-guided tours and flexible scheduling; multi-owner account management to handle different property owners; and “travel-smart” scheduling that calculates driving distance between properties for real estate agents.
Boom also took a different path in product development. It started with screening and underwriting before building leasing software on top. Many leasing CRMs began with leasing tools and are now adding newer AI models to systems originally built around more basic chatbot technology, according to Whiting.
BoomCRM, by contrast, was built using newer large language models from the outset and connects directly with BoomScreen, allowing screening information to be used earlier in the leasing process.
Boom claims one of its biggest differentiators is starting compliance-first with screening and underwriting, then building a CRM layer on top using current agentic models.
“One of the biggest failure points in the leasing funnel today is the handoff between disconnected tools (syndication → CRM / communications → underwriting → PMS),” said Miguel Armaza, co-founder and general partner at Gilgamesh Ventures. “Because Boom went deep architecturally on one continuous funnel, they solve the handoff problem without sacrificing depth at any stage.”
Revenue up eightfold year over year
Boom now serves more than 500 operators covering more than 500,000 units, according to Whiting. Customers include AMH, Roots Management, Marketplace Homes, Saratoga Group, On Q Property Management and RENU Property Management.
The company says its customer base includes more than 25% of the largest third-party single-family rental operators and about a quarter of the 100 largest manufactured housing operators.
The startup’s revenue has grown eightfold year over year and is now in the double-digit millions, according to Whiting. Boom is not yet profitable, but the company said its burn multiple — the amount of cash burned for each dollar of net new revenue — has remained below 1.0.
Boom generates revenue through a mix of models. The startup sells BoomCRM as a SaaS product, while BoomScreen uses usage-based pricing tied to the data services used during the application process.
Presently, Boom has more than 60 full-time employees, up from 19 at the end of 2024.
The company plans to use the new capital primarily for product development. It also wants to expand its presence in multifamily and student housing, alongside more leasing-focused features.
“This means delivering more agentic leasing features and new data and fintech solutions around the move-in experience,” Whiting said. “We’ll also use the funds to expand our go-to-market team across sales, marketing, and customer success.”
Boom CEO and co-founder Rob Whiting
S3 Ventures General Partner Aaron Perman believes that most property management software was built “in the pre-AI era, designed for multi-family, and had accounting ledgers at their core with the parts of the platform that touch consumers bolted on via acquisitions.”
Boom’s AI-native offering, which was designed for single-family rental and manufactured housing from the ground up, takes a very different approach, in his view.
“By providing a modern experience that unifies screening, rent reporting, and leasing into a single operational layer,” he wrote via email, “Boom dramatically reduces time-to-lease while providing a better consumer experience.”
With legacy platforms, a decision on a rental application can take anywhere from one to seven days, Perman added.
“Boom collapses that decision cycle to under a day, resulting in a better renter experience and a tangible ROI to operators,” he said. “Additionally…Boom's deeply configurable screening product enables property managers to tune leasing requirements granularly based on local regulations and the asset owner, a real differentiator compared to multi-family-focused and legacy products.”
(*Disclosure: Plaid is the parent company of This Week in Fintech; it does not have any say in our editorial process.)
