In this theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Mixture of Experts segment from the New York Stock Exchange, theCUBE’s John Furrier sits down with Raj Verma, CEO of SingleStore, to unpack how the intersection of technology and finance is shaping enterprise strategy. Verma shares why SingleStore is “on course” for the public markets, reflects on brand-building through the company’s partnership with golf Hall of Famer Padraig Harrington and connects that ethos to how SingleStore helps organizations fix struggling data “swings.” The discussion zeroes in on what’s next as Wall Street watches the AI infrastructure buildout: after chips and systems, the software and data layers set the pace for value creation.
Verma outlines why enterprises must modernize “brown” data estates into “green” ones to safely bring corporate context, governance and compliance into LLM workflows via RAG – and why commoditized data-at-rest puts the advantage at the query layer that unifies data in motion with data at rest. He predicts agentic AI will gain reasoning capabilities in roughly 18 months, cites industry indicators like Google reporting ~25% of its software now built by AI and argues that high switching costs will give way to disruption as buyers reassess legacy vendors. The conversation closes with concrete momentum: ~33% YoY growth, ARR in the ~$135M range, gross dollar retention ~98%, cloud NDR ~130, ~50% of business now in the cloud, landing ~3 new customers per day, a path to cash-flow breakeven in the next two quarters and a teaser for AI-related announcements in the next two months. Listeners will find notable stats, real-world use cases and forward-looking views on how databases power reliable AI at enterprise scale.
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Ben Currin, Vantaca
In this theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Mixture of Experts segment from the New York Stock Exchange, theCUBE’s John Furrier sits down with Raj Verma, CEO of SingleStore, to unpack how the intersection of technology and finance is shaping enterprise strategy. Verma shares why SingleStore is “on course” for the public markets, reflects on brand-building through the company’s partnership with golf Hall of Famer Padraig Harrington and connects that ethos to how SingleStore helps organizations fix struggling data “swings.” The discussion zeroes in on what’s next as Wall Street watches the AI infrastructure buildout: after chips and systems, the software and data layers set the pace for value creation.
Verma outlines why enterprises must modernize “brown” data estates into “green” ones to safely bring corporate context, governance and compliance into LLM workflows via RAG – and why commoditized data-at-rest puts the advantage at the query layer that unifies data in motion with data at rest. He predicts agentic AI will gain reasoning capabilities in roughly 18 months, cites industry indicators like Google reporting ~25% of its software now built by AI and argues that high switching costs will give way to disruption as buyers reassess legacy vendors. The conversation closes with concrete momentum: ~33% YoY growth, ARR in the ~$135M range, gross dollar retention ~98%, cloud NDR ~130, ~50% of business now in the cloud, landing ~3 new customers per day, a path to cash-flow breakeven in the next two quarters and a teaser for AI-related announcements in the next two months. Listeners will find notable stats, real-world use cases and forward-looking views on how databases power reliable AI at enterprise scale.
>> I am John Furrier with theCUBE here at our NYSE studio with NYSE WIRED and NYSE WIRED community. Of course, we have a Palo Alto studio connecting Wall Street and Silicon Valley and of course cover all the events out in tech. We got a great mixture of expert series. We're adding to that here with Ben Currin of Vantaca doing a very compelling approach to technology and communities. Again, this is also a great example of physical AI where physical assets are affected and digitization. Ben, thanks for coming on. Appreciate you coming on.
Ben Currin
>> Yeah, glad to be here, John. Thanks.
John Furrier
>> So I love your story. I want to get into it because I think you're in illustration of the megatrend that's happening post-AI infrastructure boom that we're living in, and all the headlines. NVIDIA 5 trillion market cap, they just had their event. They talk about physical AI as kind of the north star. Thinking and reasoning, more thinking with their GPUs. Their systems are getting better faster. But what you're doing is kind of the next leg of the journey where, okay, when you digitize things, this value creation and extraction. So let's talk about what you guys do. Explain the company, when it was founded, what your value proposition is. I want to get into some of your thoughts on how you see it evolving.
Ben Currin
>> Sure, absolutely. So a lot of topics there, and I think first of all, what is our market? So community association management is who we serve. Those are our customers, community association management company. So what the heck is community association management? For everyone to understand it, it's property management with a specific focus on homeowners associations, condominium associations, co-ops. So all those things are community association management companies. And so what do we do for them? We really provide them a system of record. So at the very basic things, what do we do? It's a general ledger accounting system. Processing those homeowner association dues that we all love to pay or hate to pay, Working with the vendors, paying the vendors, doing all the financial reporting. So kind of system of record work and then the system of work for these professional property managers to do that work. It's the back office staff, the community managers themselves, everything in between. And then the system of engagement. How do our customers work with their customers? So homeowners in communities, board members, vendors, that whole ecosystem. And now with AI, a system of orchestration around it. So that's kind of in a nutshell, what is community association management? That's what it is, and what do we do, we kind of power all those.
John Furrier
>> I mean, everyone can relate to that because we either have been in a community or have parents that retired to, say a golf community like my parents did, or just you have a building. Here in New York, that's very popular. And you pay fees and the services they promised and they do it. But it's all manual's human based systems. Okay. Yeah, accounting, ERP systems, CRMs, that's like old school. How are you thinking about the technology approach? Because one of the themes with AI and tech now is the efficiencies drivers that you can drive efficiency into the system productivity. Jensen Huang talks about AI not as a tool, but as work. So if you can work out the efficiencies,
Ben Currin
>> I think that's exactly right. And I think, I guess in our industry, there's a couple eras of leapfrogging forward. And not too long ago, the community association management industry, as you might imagine, was pretty sleepy when it came to technology. So when we got started 2016, 2017, it was all about a better ERP, a better CRM for management companies. And automation was a big deal. Just to automate the papers moving around the office and do that digitally, that was a big deal. And doing these through configurable workflows was a big deal. But now with AI, it's really not about just automation. It is true delivery of that end result. And so you said efficiency. I do think that when I think about AI, people do kind of ask about is it going to replace people, is it going to replace things? And maybe some things will move around, but really we're replacing inefficiency, not human labor. We're replacing that inefficiency kind of between the human connection and all those things and then enhancing that. So that's really something that I'm quite hopeful for that we can drive.
John Furrier
>> And one of the top stories that came out of the NVIDIA conference as well as our programming around AI factories is a lot of the jobs say in retail, people just don't want to do them. It's not that they're on a shortage of people. There's certain jobs that are good tasks to give to an agent.
Ben Currin
>> I think that's right. And just in our world, when I think about that, when I think about the job of a community manager, the job of a community association management company, there's a lot of really important human-to-human connection and community-building things to be done. But oftentimes the people that are in those roles only spend 10, 15, 20% of their time doing that because they're so busy chasing paper around or chasing down tasks and worrying about those automatable things. When we can really kind of lean further from automation to execute that work through digital labor and then build better and better human connection.
John Furrier
>> One of the things that's exploding onto the scene superfast is wireless and edge, at edge networks. So if you look at the AI trends, everyone's talking about the CapEx build-outs of data centers, neo-clouds, one of the things that's happening superfast is the hyper-convergence of the edge. Meaning we all know what 5G is. We all see our phones. 6Gs came out with NVIDIA and Nokia. And so when you have wireless overlay that's fully converged with WiFi, you now have a consumerization layer. And if you look at some of the AI boxes that say NVIDIA's making, they're like this big. They're small little mini-GPUs. You put that in a light pole, you can put that in a golf course, you can put it in a building. You're essentially putting wireless access to an AI machine that could talk to network and something else. We think that's going to explode massive value for things like what you're doing because communities because as you start nailing... You start chipping away at the workflows, you lay down the pipes, so to speak, the workflows with eight CRMs, you get the systems in place, then the engagement layer, it is okay, how do you react dynamically to services? It could be generative. So that's where the apps come in. So share your vision on how you see that playing out. One, do you agree or not?
Ben Currin
>> Well, absolutely. I think there's a few layers to peel back of all of that. And when we think about it first, again, I like to think about what is the system of record and do we have access to all the right information? And when I say we, our customers, AI, agents, these models, we have access to all the information to be effective. And then what does that system of work, where can AI do work at an even faster and better way for humans and then humans to spend the time kind of building that engagement that only humans can do, which is pretty unique. And so a big thing that we think about right now is how with technology to create a great environment to harness the power of all things that AI can bring and kind of ride that megatrend of what's possible either through even hardware-enabled things or certainly as models continue to develop and continue to be enhanced, just create an environment to take advantage of everything that's possible through this continued innovation.
John Furrier
>> I want to get your thoughts on stuff fresh off from Nvidia. Jensen Huang presented three scaling laws, pre-training, post-training, test time, thinking. So thinking, long thinking they call it. It's a virtuous cycle. And this is where when you start getting into understanding the data, the people's interactions, the kinds of things you can do. Now also robotics is coming into the scene too. So now you're going to have... I mean you're not humanoids yet, but I mean you're going to have some tasks, whether it's maintenance could be done with robots. So you now have this kind of convergence of digital technology. And one of the key things he talked about was the adoption of it is the critical piece of it. If you don't adopt it, the circle doesn't work.
Ben Currin
>> A hundred percent. And just on the note of adoption, one thing that's been cool, and I'm just really grateful for in our industry, that again has been, I think traditionally when people think about H-Way management, you don't think cutting edge technology innovation all the time. It's not just that we're leading this charge into this. Our customers and professional community managers have shown that they're willing to adopt cutting edge technology and really take advantage of some of these things, kind of ride the wave of what's possible through AI and deliver real world impact to their customers and communities faster than other industries have. And so I think when we zoom out and we look at overall AI trends, there's a lot of really cool and sexy AI marketing out there. But in terms of real world impact of delivering efficiency and value in your community, it's exciting. It's happening in a real way in communities all across the US.
John Furrier
>> This year is kind of an inflection point 2025 because prior to this year, the big hype in ChatGPT, the AI buzz, this is the year where the models are getting good enough where people will pay for them. Okay, so that's been covering that on theCUBE, on our programming. And so take that to your community. What are some of the use cases? Where are you starting to see the traction? Because that's the crossover point where something that might not have been a sexy vertical or area can be transformed overnight because this networks of people, I mean the network effect, the interactions, you have this edge component. How is that work... Give some examples where you're seeing the AI good enough to start that cycle going.
Ben Currin
>> Well, I think, yeah, I would go much further than good enough. I think it in some very specific kind of defined use cases, and it just so happens that the back office accounting functions and sorting through massive amounts of work for large numbers of homeowners and communities is kind of the perfect environment for AI to have massive impact. What we've seen is our customers are able to say, "Okay, to deliver this community management experience, 70, 75 plus percent of their expense structure is payroll."
It's human time. So if we can supplement and spend on AI and we can get so much more leverage on that human interaction, that human time rather than just chasing down these tasks. So we view it as every hour that we can save a human from chasing around paper, chasing down a task, it's something that can be repurposed into actually building community, actually building relationships and all these things. And to your point, in 2025, just this year, we're over a million AI-enabled workflows completed on behalf of our customers. That's hundreds of thousands of hours that are saved and able to be repurposed. And that's exciting. That's real community building.
John Furrier
>> Yeah, I was talking to some folks in New York last week and the AI came up in conversation and they're like, "We have old OT stuff, operational technology like boilers that are not..." They have sensors on them, but they're old sensors. So you also have the physical plant of a community. Plant, I use that word kind of as a technical word, but that's you know what I'm talking about. That can be leveraged, connected. And then also you got not just energy savings, a bunch of other new insights. So this idea of driving the financial performance and you're getting down to waste removal.
Ben Currin
>> Exactly right. And not only reactive performance management today, but proactive to say, "What's really going to happen in this community over the next few years? Can we plan for that? If I'm buying a home or an apartment or a unit in this building, do I really know what's going to happen into the future or am I going to be surprised by a massive special assessment?" I think things like AI can really help us to forecast and be proactive in the management of our communities in our own forecasting and everything like that, which is again, super exciting.
John Furrier
>> Give some examples of some successes in your model with communities that people might not know about. It doesn't have to be the coolest thing, or relevant. Cool and relevant would be great, but give some examples-
Ben Currin
>> Well, they're cool and relevant to me and they're cool and relevant to our industry. They might not seem cool and relevant all the time.
John Furrier
>> Well, what does cool mean? Does it help people do things better, save money, make money?
Ben Currin
>> Exactly right. And the good to not only save and make money, but also build better community. And I think that really does matter. So some kind of key examples, something like the budgeting process, I love to highlight, which is a big deal. If you live in a complex building with amenities and staff and lots of physical assets, boilers and otherwise, the budgeting for not only reserve contributions for future repairs, asset management, what's going to happen, what's the dynamics of insurance and all these things. It's a big complicated thing. And it would take a community manager and an accounting team potentially weeks to really get to a great board of directors level budget. And instead you can start there. You can say, "Hey, generate this budget. Take into account everything we know about this community, all our data sources, make a forecast and do that." So budgeting's great, all of the back office accounting functionality, just giving the humans that do those jobs superpowers. So you're not chasing down which vendor should I pay for this? What general ledger account is this? That information can be known. It can be really well predicted by AI.
John Furrier
>> One of the things that comes up a lot of my interviews is you sort of see the patterns. One of the patterns is if they have a lot of data or workflows, the first order of business is what do we got? Because like you said, to lay out a budget, there's a lot of planning involved. There's always circumstances that happen, situations that arise, insurance could go up. What's the impact of that? You got to do math on that. You got to pen that out, as they say. Those are like, what do I got first? Then once you know what you got, you then can go into more proactive roles. Do you see that same thing happening because you kind of basically just laid it out as an example?
Ben Currin
>> So not only there, so lots of proactive opportunity to jump in and help at the community level what we see, but also think about what are the proactive things that we can use AI to do just to improve living in a community. So I'll pick on an example that maybe will resonate with some people, and that's the idea of what you can't do in an HOA, like I left my trash out or my yard's too long or those things. So instead of reactively having a violations process to deal with that, maybe we can have a proactive compliance or rewarding good behavior process to go out-
John Furrier
>> Or a notification.
Ben Currin
>> Exactly right. Hey, we're going to come and inspect tomorrow, maybe have your trash cans pulled in. Let's be proactive instead of reactive in those things. And all of these things AI can take massive advantage of. And just another kind of quick highlight and real example. So we have a product called HOAI voice, which is effectively a voice agent, kind of like the ultimate customer service representative. And think about all the structured and unstructured data that this person is perfectly aware of, this agent can know. So instead of calling in and saying, "Hey, I live at this address, please look up my information." Based on my phone number, I can know everything about my account, my history, my community's history, be perfectly aware of the vendors that I could use. And so there's just so much-
John Furrier
>> That's a great point. I want to double click on that because that comes up a lot too. So if you don't have a huge IT department or domain experts that's read every rule and regulation on the planet, that point of contact becomes instantly a superpower. It's like the matrix. That scene in the matrix where he wants to fly a helicopter and upload how to fly a helicopter. In a way, that's what you're providing the agent, and then they get the answer they want.
Ben Currin
>> That's right. Well, and think about how difficult that is as a human. I mean, I think I've got pretty good customer service, but on my best day, if you call in and you're one of tens of thousands of homeowners that I serve as a community manager, I'm going to have to look up your information. I'm going to look up the rules and regs for your community. I'm going to look up history. It's going to take me a while even with great software to do, but an agent being perfectly aware of that can just get you the right answer right away.
John Furrier
>> In real time, like, "Oh, they had a board meeting last night and in the minutes, it said..." Who does that?
Ben Currin
>> That's right. And I'll take it a step further. If you're calling and as an AI agent, I know based on your phone number that you just got an email and maybe you just opened an email about a violation for leaving your trash cans open, I can answer the call to help you with that rather than answer the call and you tell me about your problems. It's, "Hey, are you calling about this? I can help you resolve that here."
John Furrier
>> Or here's a ticket number, I'll get back to you, which is no one loves that. They like that just as much as they like HOA fees. So the other thing I want to ask you, and I'm just curious because in a community, I'd want to know, where's the money going? What's in it for me? I'm paying some dough here. How can I tap the services?
Ben Currin
>> Totally. And I think that's probably pretty hard for most homeowners in the traditional model to know that. Maybe you have to go to your board and ask. Maybe the board can't give you a great answer. Maybe you ask your community manager and they'd give you an answer. But what if you have specific questions? What's the history of that? Why did we have this assessment? Why'd they do that five years ago? Again, with perfect awareness of all the data, structured and unstructured, you can get that answer, which is pretty cool.
John Furrier
>> In my building, I love to use the golf simulator, which is popular. There's a lot of young people living in the building and it's New York, people, not a lot of golf in the winter. I have to go to a website, check a calendar, and then I go, "Okay, it's available Thursday, but it's Monday, whatever. I'd love a notification." Hey, it's open. Or Hey, ping, is it open right now? And just tell me.
Ben Currin
>> Yeah, exactly right. And what we see our customers doing, the ones that are really on the cutting edge and really taking advantage of what's possible, not only through great software, but cutting edge AI is really saying, "We can personalize your property management, your community management experience, and maybe you want to know, hey, I want a notification or I want a phone call when the simulator's open in the next hour. I just want to go down there and use it." And maybe you can curate that experience through AI. And with humans that's just not scalable, maybe not practical, but with AI, all of a sudden you can have this very personalized experience, which is exciting.
John Furrier
>> Ben, great example of a business I think is in the physical transformation. There's instant results. People can see immediate value. And again, if AI's good enough, people will pay for it, and if you're implementing it. Give us a status of the business. You mentioned some stats earlier. Give us some numbers, momentum, goals, put a plug in. Are you looking to hire? Give us a status.
Ben Currin
>> Absolutely. Well, we're always looking for top talent, so we're always very hungry to build a great team, but we've been around since 2016, started building software, then got our first real customer in the fall of 2017, bootstrapped the business along for several years. We've funded the business over time with a couple minority investments. Just announced a big funding round over $300 million led by Cove Hill partners into the business.
John Furrier
>> Congratulations.
Ben Currin
>> Really exciting. And in terms of scale and reach, we support community association manager companies all over the country. Those are our customers. That's who we go to bat for and go to work for every single day. They've got a lot of reach. They support over 50,000 community associations throughout the US, over 6 million doors now. So that's our business.
John Furrier
>> So I want to get your vision. Last question. How do you see the vision as playing out? Because first of all, what was the funding round? You said bootstrap then did a 300 ?
Ben Currin
>> Bootstrapped it around... 2022, we raised our first real funding. JMI equity, they've been great partners to us. We raised a minority round back in 2022, and then most recently-
John Furrier
>> 300 million.
Ben Currin
>> Most recently, a couple of weeks ago-
John Furrier
>> That's some fresh cash.
Ben Currin
>> That's right.
John Furrier
>> So I want to get your vision because one of the things, I'm sure you have an opinion on this, hospitals are doing, which is kind of similar, but not really, but they're networking diverse hospitals together because they all are using AI in the operating rooms. They're fully digital twinning everything. This is kind of an Nvidia story, but the trend is networking together, the hospitals for, where AI agents can understand either best practices across the communities. Are you thinking about that? What's your vision for the future? How do you see that moving? Because sometimes the left hand doesn't talk to the right hand, but you have unique data on that. Do you have a vision to network all these communities together?
Ben Currin
>> Absolutely. And I'll even go back in time and even before AI, the idea of community. And we happen to serve community, but we also have a great community of our customers who love to get together, love to share ideas, love to share best practices from all over the US. And sometimes there's things that the New York market is doing really well that Florida can learn from. And Texas is doing great, and California, all these different communities. And so we love to bring our users together. We have a robust online community, and we also do a lot of in-person events. We have our own industry conference called Vantaca Vision happening in San Antonio, Texas in a couple of weeks, which is going to be almost a thousand folks coming together and sharing best practices. And now with AI, we can not only do that through human connection, but through kind of robust analysis of data to say, "Here's the best way to do this thing. And have you ever thought about this opportunity to deliver real value to your communities?" So the power of community, I think just gets further unlocked.
John Furrier
>> Yeah, you get more data. It's a flywheel. It's a virtuous circle. Thanks for coming on, theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Thanks for taking the time. Again. AI impacting the physical world, from communities, homeowners, buildings, communities, to hospitals, to everything else. You're starting to see the breakthroughs where efficiencies and AI can make a difference in people's lives. And again, it's a technology approach, but it's really impacting society. And again, another great example here in our mixture of expert series. My name's John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching.
>> I am John Furrier with theCUBE here at our NYSE studio with NYSE WIRED and NYSE WIRED community. Of course, we have a Palo Alto studio connecting Wall Street and Silicon Valley and of course cover all the events out in tech. We got a great mixture of expert series. We're adding to that here with Ben Currin of Vantaca doing a very compelling approach to technology and communities. Again, this is also a great example of physical AI where physical assets are affected and digitization. Ben, thanks for coming on. Appreciate you coming on.
Ben Currin
>> Yeah, glad to be here, John. Thanks.
John Furrier
>> So I love your story. I want to get into it because I think you're in illustration of the megatrend that's happening post-AI infrastructure boom that we're living in, and all the headlines. NVIDIA 5 trillion market cap, they just had their event. They talk about physical AI as kind of the north star. Thinking and reasoning, more thinking with their GPUs. Their systems are getting better faster. But what you're doing is kind of the next leg of the journey where, okay, when you digitize things, this value creation and extraction. So let's talk about what you guys do. Explain the company, when it was founded, what your value proposition is. I want to get into some of your thoughts on how you see it evolving.
Ben Currin
>> Sure, absolutely. So a lot of topics there, and I think first of all, what is our market? So community association management is who we serve. Those are our customers, community association management company. So what the heck is community association management? For everyone to understand it, it's property management with a specific focus on homeowners associations, condominium associations, co-ops. So all those things are community association management companies. And so what do we do for them? We really provide them a system of record. So at the very basic things, what do we do? It's a general ledger accounting system. Processing those homeowner association dues that we all love to pay or hate to pay, Working with the vendors, paying the vendors, doing all the financial reporting. So kind of system of record work and then the system of work for these professional property managers to do that work. It's the back office staff, the community managers themselves, everything in between. And then the system of engagement. How do our customers work with their customers? So homeowners in communities, board members, vendors, that whole ecosystem. And now with AI, a system of orchestration around it. So that's kind of in a nutshell, what is community association management? That's what it is, and what do we do, we kind of power all those.
John Furrier
>> I mean, everyone can relate to that because we either have been in a community or have parents that retired to, say a golf community like my parents did, or just you have a building. Here in New York, that's very popular. And you pay fees and the services they promised and they do it. But it's all manual's human based systems. Okay. Yeah, accounting, ERP systems, CRMs, that's like old school. How are you thinking about the technology approach? Because one of the themes with AI and tech now is the efficiencies drivers that you can drive efficiency into the system productivity. Jensen Huang talks about AI not as a tool, but as work. So if you can work out the efficiencies,
Ben Currin
>> I think that's exactly right. And I think, I guess in our industry, there's a couple eras of leapfrogging forward. And not too long ago, the community association management industry, as you might imagine, was pretty sleepy when it came to technology. So when we got started 2016, 2017, it was all about a better ERP, a better CRM for management companies. And automation was a big deal. Just to automate the papers moving around the office and do that digitally, that was a big deal. And doing these through configurable workflows was a big deal. But now with AI, it's really not about just automation. It is true delivery of that end result. And so you said efficiency. I do think that when I think about AI, people do kind of ask about is it going to replace people, is it going to replace things? And maybe some things will move around, but really we're replacing inefficiency, not human labor. We're replacing that inefficiency kind of between the human connection and all those things and then enhancing that. So that's really something that I'm quite hopeful for that we can drive.
John Furrier
>> And one of the top stories that came out of the NVIDIA conference as well as our programming around AI factories is a lot of the jobs say in retail, people just don't want to do them. It's not that they're on a shortage of people. There's certain jobs that are good tasks to give to an agent.
Ben Currin
>> I think that's right. And just in our world, when I think about that, when I think about the job of a community manager, the job of a community association management company, there's a lot of really important human-to-human connection and community-building things to be done. But oftentimes the people that are in those roles only spend 10, 15, 20% of their time doing that because they're so busy chasing paper around or chasing down tasks and worrying about those automatable things. When we can really kind of lean further from automation to execute that work through digital labor and then build better and better human connection.
John Furrier
>> One of the things that's exploding onto the scene superfast is wireless and edge, at edge networks. So if you look at the AI trends, everyone's talking about the CapEx build-outs of data centers, neo-clouds, one of the things that's happening superfast is the hyper-convergence of the edge. Meaning we all know what 5G is. We all see our phones. 6Gs came out with NVIDIA and Nokia. And so when you have wireless overlay that's fully converged with WiFi, you now have a consumerization layer. And if you look at some of the AI boxes that say NVIDIA's making, they're like this big. They're small little mini-GPUs. You put that in a light pole, you can put that in a golf course, you can put it in a building. You're essentially putting wireless access to an AI machine that could talk to network and something else. We think that's going to explode massive value for things like what you're doing because communities because as you start nailing... You start chipping away at the workflows, you lay down the pipes, so to speak, the workflows with eight CRMs, you get the systems in place, then the engagement layer, it is okay, how do you react dynamically to services? It could be generative. So that's where the apps come in. So share your vision on how you see that playing out. One, do you agree or not?
Ben Currin
>> Well, absolutely. I think there's a few layers to peel back of all of that. And when we think about it first, again, I like to think about what is the system of record and do we have access to all the right information? And when I say we, our customers, AI, agents, these models, we have access to all the information to be effective. And then what does that system of work, where can AI do work at an even faster and better way for humans and then humans to spend the time kind of building that engagement that only humans can do, which is pretty unique. And so a big thing that we think about right now is how with technology to create a great environment to harness the power of all things that AI can bring and kind of ride that megatrend of what's possible either through even hardware-enabled things or certainly as models continue to develop and continue to be enhanced, just create an environment to take advantage of everything that's possible through this continued innovation.
John Furrier
>> I want to get your thoughts on stuff fresh off from Nvidia. Jensen Huang presented three scaling laws, pre-training, post-training, test time, thinking. So thinking, long thinking they call it. It's a virtuous cycle. And this is where when you start getting into understanding the data, the people's interactions, the kinds of things you can do. Now also robotics is coming into the scene too. So now you're going to have... I mean you're not humanoids yet, but I mean you're going to have some tasks, whether it's maintenance could be done with robots. So you now have this kind of convergence of digital technology. And one of the key things he talked about was the adoption of it is the critical piece of it. If you don't adopt it, the circle doesn't work.
Ben Currin
>> A hundred percent. And just on the note of adoption, one thing that's been cool, and I'm just really grateful for in our industry, that again has been, I think traditionally when people think about H-Way management, you don't think cutting edge technology innovation all the time. It's not just that we're leading this charge into this. Our customers and professional community managers have shown that they're willing to adopt cutting edge technology and really take advantage of some of these things, kind of ride the wave of what's possible through AI and deliver real world impact to their customers and communities faster than other industries have. And so I think when we zoom out and we look at overall AI trends, there's a lot of really cool and sexy AI marketing out there. But in terms of real world impact of delivering efficiency and value in your community, it's exciting. It's happening in a real way in communities all across the US.
John Furrier
>> This year is kind of an inflection point 2025 because prior to this year, the big hype in ChatGPT, the AI buzz, this is the year where the models are getting good enough where people will pay for them. Okay, so that's been covering that on theCUBE, on our programming. And so take that to your community. What are some of the use cases? Where are you starting to see the traction? Because that's the crossover point where something that might not have been a sexy vertical or area can be transformed overnight because this networks of people, I mean the network effect, the interactions, you have this edge component. How is that work... Give some examples where you're seeing the AI good enough to start that cycle going.
Ben Currin
>> Well, I think, yeah, I would go much further than good enough. I think it in some very specific kind of defined use cases, and it just so happens that the back office accounting functions and sorting through massive amounts of work for large numbers of homeowners and communities is kind of the perfect environment for AI to have massive impact. What we've seen is our customers are able to say, "Okay, to deliver this community management experience, 70, 75 plus percent of their expense structure is payroll."
It's human time. So if we can supplement and spend on AI and we can get so much more leverage on that human interaction, that human time rather than just chasing down these tasks. So we view it as every hour that we can save a human from chasing around paper, chasing down a task, it's something that can be repurposed into actually building community, actually building relationships and all these things. And to your point, in 2025, just this year, we're over a million AI-enabled workflows completed on behalf of our customers. That's hundreds of thousands of hours that are saved and able to be repurposed. And that's exciting. That's real community building.
John Furrier
>> Yeah, I was talking to some folks in New York last week and the AI came up in conversation and they're like, "We have old OT stuff, operational technology like boilers that are not..." They have sensors on them, but they're old sensors. So you also have the physical plant of a community. Plant, I use that word kind of as a technical word, but that's you know what I'm talking about. That can be leveraged, connected. And then also you got not just energy savings, a bunch of other new insights. So this idea of driving the financial performance and you're getting down to waste removal.
Ben Currin
>> Exactly right. And not only reactive performance management today, but proactive to say, "What's really going to happen in this community over the next few years? Can we plan for that? If I'm buying a home or an apartment or a unit in this building, do I really know what's going to happen into the future or am I going to be surprised by a massive special assessment?" I think things like AI can really help us to forecast and be proactive in the management of our communities in our own forecasting and everything like that, which is again, super exciting.
John Furrier
>> Give some examples of some successes in your model with communities that people might not know about. It doesn't have to be the coolest thing, or relevant. Cool and relevant would be great, but give some examples-
Ben Currin
>> Well, they're cool and relevant to me and they're cool and relevant to our industry. They might not seem cool and relevant all the time.
John Furrier
>> Well, what does cool mean? Does it help people do things better, save money, make money?
Ben Currin
>> Exactly right. And the good to not only save and make money, but also build better community. And I think that really does matter. So some kind of key examples, something like the budgeting process, I love to highlight, which is a big deal. If you live in a complex building with amenities and staff and lots of physical assets, boilers and otherwise, the budgeting for not only reserve contributions for future repairs, asset management, what's going to happen, what's the dynamics of insurance and all these things. It's a big complicated thing. And it would take a community manager and an accounting team potentially weeks to really get to a great board of directors level budget. And instead you can start there. You can say, "Hey, generate this budget. Take into account everything we know about this community, all our data sources, make a forecast and do that." So budgeting's great, all of the back office accounting functionality, just giving the humans that do those jobs superpowers. So you're not chasing down which vendor should I pay for this? What general ledger account is this? That information can be known. It can be really well predicted by AI.
John Furrier
>> One of the things that comes up a lot of my interviews is you sort of see the patterns. One of the patterns is if they have a lot of data or workflows, the first order of business is what do we got? Because like you said, to lay out a budget, there's a lot of planning involved. There's always circumstances that happen, situations that arise, insurance could go up. What's the impact of that? You got to do math on that. You got to pen that out, as they say. Those are like, what do I got first? Then once you know what you got, you then can go into more proactive roles. Do you see that same thing happening because you kind of basically just laid it out as an example?
Ben Currin
>> So not only there, so lots of proactive opportunity to jump in and help at the community level what we see, but also think about what are the proactive things that we can use AI to do just to improve living in a community. So I'll pick on an example that maybe will resonate with some people, and that's the idea of what you can't do in an HOA, like I left my trash out or my yard's too long or those things. So instead of reactively having a violations process to deal with that, maybe we can have a proactive compliance or rewarding good behavior process to go out-
John Furrier
>> Or a notification.
Ben Currin
>> Exactly right. Hey, we're going to come and inspect tomorrow, maybe have your trash cans pulled in. Let's be proactive instead of reactive in those things. And all of these things AI can take massive advantage of. And just another kind of quick highlight and real example. So we have a product called HOAI voice, which is effectively a voice agent, kind of like the ultimate customer service representative. And think about all the structured and unstructured data that this person is perfectly aware of, this agent can know. So instead of calling in and saying, "Hey, I live at this address, please look up my information." Based on my phone number, I can know everything about my account, my history, my community's history, be perfectly aware of the vendors that I could use. And so there's just so much-
John Furrier
>> That's a great point. I want to double click on that because that comes up a lot too. So if you don't have a huge IT department or domain experts that's read every rule and regulation on the planet, that point of contact becomes instantly a superpower. It's like the matrix. That scene in the matrix where he wants to fly a helicopter and upload how to fly a helicopter. In a way, that's what you're providing the agent, and then they get the answer they want.
Ben Currin
>> That's right. Well, and think about how difficult that is as a human. I mean, I think I've got pretty good customer service, but on my best day, if you call in and you're one of tens of thousands of homeowners that I serve as a community manager, I'm going to have to look up your information. I'm going to look up the rules and regs for your community. I'm going to look up history. It's going to take me a while even with great software to do, but an agent being perfectly aware of that can just get you the right answer right away.
John Furrier
>> In real time, like, "Oh, they had a board meeting last night and in the minutes, it said..." Who does that?
Ben Currin
>> That's right. And I'll take it a step further. If you're calling and as an AI agent, I know based on your phone number that you just got an email and maybe you just opened an email about a violation for leaving your trash cans open, I can answer the call to help you with that rather than answer the call and you tell me about your problems. It's, "Hey, are you calling about this? I can help you resolve that here."
John Furrier
>> Or here's a ticket number, I'll get back to you, which is no one loves that. They like that just as much as they like HOA fees. So the other thing I want to ask you, and I'm just curious because in a community, I'd want to know, where's the money going? What's in it for me? I'm paying some dough here. How can I tap the services?
Ben Currin
>> Totally. And I think that's probably pretty hard for most homeowners in the traditional model to know that. Maybe you have to go to your board and ask. Maybe the board can't give you a great answer. Maybe you ask your community manager and they'd give you an answer. But what if you have specific questions? What's the history of that? Why did we have this assessment? Why'd they do that five years ago? Again, with perfect awareness of all the data, structured and unstructured, you can get that answer, which is pretty cool.
John Furrier
>> In my building, I love to use the golf simulator, which is popular. There's a lot of young people living in the building and it's New York, people, not a lot of golf in the winter. I have to go to a website, check a calendar, and then I go, "Okay, it's available Thursday, but it's Monday, whatever. I'd love a notification." Hey, it's open. Or Hey, ping, is it open right now? And just tell me.
Ben Currin
>> Yeah, exactly right. And what we see our customers doing, the ones that are really on the cutting edge and really taking advantage of what's possible, not only through great software, but cutting edge AI is really saying, "We can personalize your property management, your community management experience, and maybe you want to know, hey, I want a notification or I want a phone call when the simulator's open in the next hour. I just want to go down there and use it." And maybe you can curate that experience through AI. And with humans that's just not scalable, maybe not practical, but with AI, all of a sudden you can have this very personalized experience, which is exciting.
John Furrier
>> Ben, great example of a business I think is in the physical transformation. There's instant results. People can see immediate value. And again, if AI's good enough, people will pay for it, and if you're implementing it. Give us a status of the business. You mentioned some stats earlier. Give us some numbers, momentum, goals, put a plug in. Are you looking to hire? Give us a status.
Ben Currin
>> Absolutely. Well, we're always looking for top talent, so we're always very hungry to build a great team, but we've been around since 2016, started building software, then got our first real customer in the fall of 2017, bootstrapped the business along for several years. We've funded the business over time with a couple minority investments. Just announced a big funding round over $300 million led by Cove Hill partners into the business.
John Furrier
>> Congratulations.
Ben Currin
>> Really exciting. And in terms of scale and reach, we support community association manager companies all over the country. Those are our customers. That's who we go to bat for and go to work for every single day. They've got a lot of reach. They support over 50,000 community associations throughout the US, over 6 million doors now. So that's our business.
John Furrier
>> So I want to get your vision. Last question. How do you see the vision as playing out? Because first of all, what was the funding round? You said bootstrap then did a 300 ?
Ben Currin
>> Bootstrapped it around... 2022, we raised our first real funding. JMI equity, they've been great partners to us. We raised a minority round back in 2022, and then most recently-
John Furrier
>> 300 million.
Ben Currin
>> Most recently, a couple of weeks ago-
John Furrier
>> That's some fresh cash.
Ben Currin
>> That's right.
John Furrier
>> So I want to get your vision because one of the things, I'm sure you have an opinion on this, hospitals are doing, which is kind of similar, but not really, but they're networking diverse hospitals together because they all are using AI in the operating rooms. They're fully digital twinning everything. This is kind of an Nvidia story, but the trend is networking together, the hospitals for, where AI agents can understand either best practices across the communities. Are you thinking about that? What's your vision for the future? How do you see that moving? Because sometimes the left hand doesn't talk to the right hand, but you have unique data on that. Do you have a vision to network all these communities together?
Ben Currin
>> Absolutely. And I'll even go back in time and even before AI, the idea of community. And we happen to serve community, but we also have a great community of our customers who love to get together, love to share ideas, love to share best practices from all over the US. And sometimes there's things that the New York market is doing really well that Florida can learn from. And Texas is doing great, and California, all these different communities. And so we love to bring our users together. We have a robust online community, and we also do a lot of in-person events. We have our own industry conference called Vantaca Vision happening in San Antonio, Texas in a couple of weeks, which is going to be almost a thousand folks coming together and sharing best practices. And now with AI, we can not only do that through human connection, but through kind of robust analysis of data to say, "Here's the best way to do this thing. And have you ever thought about this opportunity to deliver real value to your communities?" So the power of community, I think just gets further unlocked.
John Furrier
>> Yeah, you get more data. It's a flywheel. It's a virtuous circle. Thanks for coming on, theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Thanks for taking the time. Again. AI impacting the physical world, from communities, homeowners, buildings, communities, to hospitals, to everything else. You're starting to see the breakthroughs where efficiencies and AI can make a difference in people's lives. And again, it's a technology approach, but it's really impacting society. And again, another great example here in our mixture of expert series. My name's John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching.
John Furrier