1204: When Capital Conviction Matters More Than Market Timing | Andrew Korn, CFO, EliseAI

The company operates in housing and healthcare, two industries Korn describes as representing about 40% of U.S. GDP combined. He tells us both depend heavily on labor while contending with regulation and legacy technology. The result is overwhelmed teams, administrative work, and consumers waiting too long or paying too much for essential services.

EliseAI enters primarily through the communication layer. According to Korn, its technology handles communications and repetitive work around the clock while providing accurate, compliant answers to renters, residents, prospects, and patients.

But awareness of AI has also created a different challenge. Korn says customers increasingly arrive interested in the technology, yet EliseAI must ensure they understand what they are adopting. The objective is not AI “just for AI’s sake” or something a company can place on its website.

Instead, Korn tells us, AI must improve operations, performance, and business capabilities in tangible ways. EliseAI therefore tracks leases, occupancy, rent collection, maintenance requests, resident renewals, patient calls, and scheduled appointments.

For Korn, the technology earns its place when customers can recognize its impact in the work being completed and the results being produced.

You have overwhelmed teams buried in administrative work, and residents, in the case of housing, and patients, in the case of healthcare, who don’t receive great service, are waiting too long for the service they need, or are paying too much for it.

What EliseAI does is step in, primarily at the communication layer—whether it’s with your prospects, residents, or patients—to automate and handle that communication and busy work 24/7. We deliver real-time, accurate, compliant answers to the consumers, patients, and renters who need them. We take actions 24/7 across all channels and operations to improve experiences. The result is better-performing, better-operating businesses that serve their consumers better across both housing and healthcare.

CFOTL: Help us understand the customer demand. What’s driving it? Where does your message resonate most?

Korn: It’s evolved a bit over time. Before ChatGPT became a thing, around 2023 or 2024, it was really us pushing it more and helping people understand it. Since then, there’s been a broad awareness of AI that has gotten us a lot more inbound demand.

But even when we get that inbound interest and people are more open to talking about AI, it’s really important for us to work with our customers and prospects to make sure they understand what they’re signing up for. We pride ourselves on delivering AI not just for AI’s sake—not just to put it on the website and say you have it, or to tell your boss that you did it and get them off your back—but AI that really improves operations, performance, and the capabilities of your business.

With our best prospects and customers—and where we want to push all our prospects and customers—it’s about developing a deep understanding of their business and how AI can tangibly improve it, along with a real mutual willingness to partner in very specific and tangible ways to bring the benefits of the technology to them.

CFOTL: We want to understand your lines of sight into this business. What numbers or metrics are you watching closely and daily? For those unfamiliar with these two important verticals, what would you tell us?

Korn: From a business perspective, like most other growth companies, the number one metric I track is our growth and progress. We announced earlier this year that we’re over $200 million in annual recurring revenue. We’ve continued to grow rapidly since then, maintaining more than 100% year-over-year growth every year since I joined the company four and a half years ago—correlation, not causation.

Our growth is even accelerating. In the second quarter, we saw by far our best quarter ever from a bookings perspective and an acceleration in our year-over-year ARR growth. Below that, I track our gross margins and burn rate. We are burning money as a growth-stage company; that is why we raise capital. We monitor it closely, make sure our spending is prudent, and ensure those investments are going to the right areas to drive the business forward.

From a customer perspective—and this gets a little outside my most direct area of expertise—we have an insane amount of data about our customers’ performance. We pride ourselves on reporting that to our customers and tracking it internally to make sure we’re having an impact.

On the real estate side, that includes the number of leases we help generate, the occupancy of the buildings we directly impact, the amount of rent we help collect, the number of maintenance requests we help complete, and the number of resident renewals we help maintain.

On the healthcare side, we’re primarily automating the patient-intake and scheduling experiences. It’s a very voice-focused medium, so we track the number of calls we help handle and the number of appointments we help schedule with our products.

It’s really about helping our customers understand and drive all those business metrics, in addition to the tangible savings we help them achieve on the expense side, which primarily comes from handling repetitive tasks that were previously not automated.