Tenant screening has barely changed in decades. Findigs wants to retire the whole category.
The New York-based startup closed a $32 million Series C round Tuesday, bringing its total funding to $80 million. The round was led by Marc Weiser of RPM Ventures.
The company says it plans to use the capital to expand its AI-driven leasing decisioning platform, deepen its presence in affordable housing, including LIHTC and Section 8 workflows, and launch a Rent Guarantee product that would extend revenue protection across the full lease term.
The number that frames the pitch: Across more than 400,000 units, Findigs says its customers have seen up to 80 percent fewer evictions and 90 percent lower delinquency rates than industry averages. McKinley, one of its named customers, saw a 46 percent decline in eviction rates in 2025, reduced acquisition costs by 33 percent and pushed occupancy to 98.6 percent.
‘Is my criteria actually working?’
The core product delivers an automated yes or no — not a score, not a recommendation — on every rental application, typically within a few hours, compared with an industry average of a few days. The decision is grounded in criteria the operator sets upfront and enforces consistently across all applicants.
That last part matters more than it sounds. Steve Carroll, co-founder and CEO of Findigs, said one of the first things his team does with new customers is interrogate the criteria they’ve been using for years.
Steve Carroll
“When you ask customers how they arrived at [three times gross income to rent], almost no one has an answer rooted in data science or historical regression analysis,” Carroll told Inman. “The best I’ve ever heard is that it traces back to an FDR-era policy related to housing vouchers for soldiers.”
That standard, Carroll argues, makes little sense across a portfolio spanning sub-$1,000 single-family rentals and fully amenitized buildings with doormen and gyms. Yet the industry largely ran with it because it was convenient.
“So the first question we want to ask any new customer is: Have you even thought through your criteria correctly? We help them work through that,” Carroll said. “Ultimately, they decide what their resident composition looks like — we help with fair housing compliance, but the customer drives the criteria. Once that’s in place, our system consistently enforces it on every single resident.”
After a resident is approved, Carroll said the next question becomes, “Is my criteria actually working?
This is where Findigs has put work into normalizing and understanding data related to tenant and lease outcomes. Then, they go back to the property managers to help them ask if they need to make changes.
“It’s shocking how rarely the industry actually examines and adjusts criteria,” he said.
The second problem is what Findigs calls the philosophical flaw in the other central input: the credit score.
The FICO model is designed to predict loan repayment, not rent payment. Findigs says it layers in deeper consumer behavior analysis, robust identity verification, guarantor logic and other proprietary inputs to build what it calls a better underwriting model that is less dependent on inherited proxies.
‘We’re putting our money on the line’
The most unusual feature of Findigs’ model may be its fraud guarantee.
Carroll said Findigs is the only company in the space that backs its decisions contractually: If a tenant gets through on a fraudulent identity and the operator needs to evict, Findigs will launch an independent investigation to determine whether something was missed in underwriting.
“This isn’t screening,” Carroll said. “This is a decision. We don’t say ‘we think you should take a look at this person.’ We’re putting our stamp of approval on applicants, and then we’re putting our money on the line alongside that.”
Weiser framed his firm’s investment in similar terms. He called Findigs “the only product we’ve seen that rebuilt the decision itself,” citing the company’s post-lease performance data across 400,000-plus units as the core differentiator.
“Almost all of them still go through tools built for a different decade,” Weiser said of the tens of millions of rental applications processed annually in the U.S.
The affordable housing compliance maze
One area where Findigs is making an explicit push is affordable housing. Carroll said the platform is already configured to handle LIHTC assets, housing choice vouchers, project-based vouchers and Section 8. It’s a segment most applicant screening tools weren’t built for and don’t handle well.
The compliance challenge is significant. There are roughly 2,500 public housing authorities across the U.S., each with its own rules. Underwriting a tenant in Chicago under affordable housing regulations looks nothing like underwriting one in Nashville.
“Every American deserves housing, and we should make that as accessible as possible,” Carroll said. “A platform that can cover both market-rate and the most prominent affordable programs is something we see as a real positive for the industry.”
A product centered on decisions
Carroll said the company is trying to define a new category it’s calling “revenue quality,” optimizing simultaneously for occupancy, delinquency rates and acquisition cost, rather than treating those as separate operational problems.
“The big thing for me is what we’ve observed over the last several years: Findigs has undergone a transformation,” Carroll said. “I used to think of it as a tenant screening product — something consumed by property management customers, where they were still doing the work. Over the last two years, we’ve built an autonomous product centered on decisioning.”
He framed it as a paradigm shift. Instead of putting the work back on property management customers, they come to Findigs when they want that work totally encapsulated in one system, completely off their plates.
As part of the round, Findigs is adding Hugh R. Frater to its board. Frater was a founding partner and managing director at BlackRock and a former CEO of Fannie Mae.
“For too long, operators and prospective residents have lived with manual reviews, inconsistent criteria, and slow turnarounds because there was no alternative,” Frater said in a statement. “Modern technology provides the alternative.”
Correction: This post has been updated to accurately reflect Hugh R. Frater’s role with Findigs.
