When you name your startup Billee, you better bring some serious energy to the bill, utility or otherwise. Turns out, John Hinckley knows exactly how to deliver the charge.
Fresh off his exit from RealPage and still carrying receipts from two decades inside the PropTech machine, John Hinckley spotted a gap big enough to drive a fleet of electric vans through: multifamily utility billing. Clunky ingestion, missing charges, compliance chaos, support emails vanishing into the abyss. Property operators were burning money in silence. And not the fun kind of burn.
So in 2024, he flipped the switch and lit up Billee Technologies. A platform built on agentic AI, machine learning pipelines, and end-to-end automation that actually means something, from utility invoice ingestion to anomaly detection to intelligent audits and resident support that doesn’t sound like it was outsourced to a fax machine.
Fast forward to today, and Billee just secured a $9.15M seed round led by RET Ventures, joined by a syndicate of heavyweight apartment operators who collectively manage north of 4 million units. These aren’t VC tourists, they are the customer. And when your early backers are also your power users, you’ve got more than capital, you’ve got compounding conviction.
Now live across 50,000 units in Texas, Oklahoma, Arizona, and California, the platform isn’t just making billing efficient, it’s recovering cash most property managers didn’t know they were missing. SOC 2 Type II security, integrations with Yardi and RealPage, embedded compliance for ever-shifting state regs, and enough workflow orchestration to make a Swiss watch blush.
John Hinckley’s been here before. And this time, he’s not alone. Interim CMO Mateen Aini brings the branding voltage, backed by RET’s network and a product roadmap that’s heading straight for sustainability insights, IoT metering, and mobile tools that actually serve the on-site teams doing the real work.
There are 40 million multifamily units in the U.S. and $3B in utility billing spend. Billee isn’t nibbling at the edges. They’re going straight for the $24K per property per month most owners leave on the table. That’s not SaaS. That’s a financial reclamation.
