Jay McKee.
Jay McKee
Founder and CEO at Lessen
Tempting as it may be to say that Lessen has proved itself to be more, the proptech company’s huge growth is clear — whatever the bad punning.
Founded in 2019, the Scottsdale, Ariz.-based property services and facilities maintenance platform for commercial real estate owners and vendors has produced explosive revenue growth organically and through the biggest proptech acquisition to date in 2023.
Lessen’s revenue was about $800 million for 2023, and at the start of 2024 was on its way to more than $1 billion of gross merchandise value revenue, Jay McKee told Commercial Observer in February. That revenue generation followed Lessen’s $950 million deal for property maintenance firm SMS Assist in 2023.
This year, Lessen was named the fastest-growing private software company in the U.S. by Inc. magazine (and No. 2 among companies in all categories), with a three-year revenue growth of more than 45,000 percent.
In June, Lessen introduced Lessen Copilot, a generative AI tool for residential and commercial tenants. Copilot’s conversational interface, which Lessen compares to ChatGPT, allows users to initiate and manage work orders by describing their issues in plain language. The AI can submit a new work order or check the status of an existing one 24/7 in multiple languages. Lessen claims the technology has already proved successful, as Copilot reduces the average time to process a work order by 20 percent, while also reducing the number of work orders with errors.
A couple of months before Copilot took off, Lessen also launched the Lessen Advantage Marketplace to provide its 30,000 vendors across the country with discounted materials, insurance and financing. The company claims savings for its vendors using the marketplace averages more than 18 percent. Lessen Advantage Marketplace includes thousands of products for real estate management, including paint, plumbing supplies, lumber and tools.
