Artificial intelligence-powered short-term rental (STR), hotel and housing platform HostAI has become Conduit and raised $3.1 million.
Cole Rubin, co-founder and CEO of Conduit, shared the news in a lengthy post on LinkedIn and said the seed funding will accelerate growth and enable the company to work with more real estate operators.
Conduit, which started out calling itself “Shopify for Travel,” has grown from an automated guest messaging tool for STRs “into something much bigger,” Rubin said.
“The short-term rental industry pushed us in that direction,” Rubin said. “It was chaotic—operators were juggling dozens of tools, and the integration landscape was nowhere near mature enough to support a viable third-party messaging product—core integrations didn’t exist.”
The company built workarounds in response, integrating with Airbnb’s application programming interface, developing more features, developing more integrations and now working with STR managers around the globe. The efforts laid the groundwork for the company in its new iteration as Conduit, Rubin said.
“Conduit partners with enterprise property managers across all asset classes to power the future of real estate operations—with AI at the core. Real estate is a conversation-driven industry,” Rubin said. “Leasing, retention, maintenance, scheduling—it all runs on messaging and phone calls. But most operators are still stuck with fragmented systems and manual workflows. We saw a better way.”
Conduit’s AI agents can handle voice and text conversations and be integrated with companies’ businesses, from systems to documentation. They’re meant to function like “your best team member,” according to Rubin, who said the agents are responsive, consistent and know when to “escalate.”
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Specific capabilities include unit leasing, resolving guest issues, collecting payments and driving renewals.
Rubin said the hope is the agents will serve as a communication engine to improve revenue and conversions and cut operational cost while maintaining quality.
The new funding was led by Pi Labs, according to investor Dhruv Gupta, who also shared the news on LinkedIn.
“We are thrilled to lead the $3.1 million seed round in Conduit (formerly HostAI), with participation from our friends at Y Combinator led by Pete Koomen, a16z Scout, YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim, Snapdocs founder Aaron King and others,” he said.
Gupta said Conduit's founding team, value proposition, customer perception, market opportunity and AI capabilities were among the key reasons why Pi Labs invested in the company.
“We believe AI agents are the future of property management. Conduit's AI, designed specifically for tenant/guest engagement, positions it as a leader in this technological shift,” Gupta said. “They have a strong product roadmap to maintain their competitive edge.”