Californian-based company Snappt was built to help multifamily real estate operators fight fraud. The risk has intensified in recent years, as bad actors have increasingly leveraged AI to forge rental application documents, and once they gain access to properties, they refuse to pay rent or vacate the premises.
The National Multifamily Housing Council found 93% of United States rental housing providers surveyed have experienced this kind of tenancy application fraud, creating an estimated average of $4.2M in bad debt per multifamily operator each year.
Snappt cofounders Daniel Berlind and Noah Goldman were working in real estate, managing 500 units across greater Los Angeles, when they realized that fraud was on the rise.
“Tenants with good credit, no criminal background, no prior eviction history, were resulting in bad debt write-offs or eviction,” explains Kyle Nelson, chief business officer at Snappt, who worked closely with the founders.
When they reviewed the documentation, they found anomalies. “They were being provided fake income documentation for proof of income during the apartment application process,” says Nelson.
Unable to find an existing tool to solve the problem, the pair teamed up with an antivirus specialist and started building their own, which officially launched in 2019.
“The first document to ever pass through Snappt from a customer was fraudulent. [It was] a great signal that they were onto something.”
Explosive growth and a new CEO
This type of fraud became increasingly commonplace during the COVID-19 pandemic, as tenant vetting moved entirely online for the first time. In 2022, one in every eight documents scanned by Snappt was fraudulent.
After Snappt raised its $100M Series A led by Insight Partners in March 2022 and brought Managing Director Thomas Krane onto the board, growth exploded, and Snappt quickly became a market leader.
But the founders knew that they needed to bring in an experienced technology leader to take the company to the next level. In early 2025, they approached James Hyde, who has held leadership roles at Venminder (as CEO), PayPal, Braintree, Venmo, and iPay Technologies.
Following the sale of his last business, Hyde had planned to take a year off to spend time with his twins, but was drawn to Snappt by the opportunity to tackle fraud at scale and something he calls the “wow trifecta.”
He explains: “Do I love the people? Do I love the technology? And do I love the client? Because if you get those three things together, well, that’s worth the sacrifice of saying, let’s run hard again.”
After taking up his post as CEO in June 2025, he revamped the go-to-market function, streamlining the organization and promoting the people who spent the most time with customers.
He brought in an era of transparency, updating the team with Snappt’s growth metrics and how the company was performing against rivals, and reprioritized the product roadmap away from “the shiny objects” to focus on customer needs.
“We are customer-first, always. We ask, what’s the value to our existing customer above and beyond expansion?” he explains.
“Everything we build, how we engage, the decisions we make will all be around the customer.”
Having significantly accelerated the growth rate without increasing headcount, Hyde reveals that the company’s gross margins are exceeding 80%. “This is a pivotal moment for the business,” he says.
AI-native from day one
When Snappt first launched, AI tools were in their infancy; ChatGPT only became available in 2022. But Snappt has been using machine learning from inception. “Our algorithms were being fed all of these real and fake documents via a machine learning premise,” explains Nelson.
But the data net is increasingly spread far and wide. “We leverage independent data sources,” explains Nelson. “Whether that’s public record data or proprietary data, in order to improve the accuracy and efficacy of our fraud detection.”
Snappt now uses multiple agents to interrogate incoming data — each agent has its own specific function — fact-checking the numbers against multiple sources. Using third-party data, Snappt is moving ever closer to a “source of truth” model whereby every claim is verified against the original data record.
“This is the level of fraud detection that’s needed to combat some of these advanced fraud rings out there that are wreaking havoc, not just on multifamily real estate, but other categories like financial services and auto and consumer lending,” says Nelson.
In 2026, Snappt also rolled out its employment verification tool, which can verify whether submitted letters of employment are genuine. The platform is increasingly an end-to-end AI-powered verification engine.
“The way you identify them, the way you calculate income, the way you actually verify rent, rental history payment, the way you verify employment history, it’s all sitting on a foundation of fraud forensics,” explains Hyde. “That’s the platform.”
Scale up your career: See all open roles at Snappt.
The investor POV
“James can unlock the inner potential of every single one of his employees in an almost magical way.”
Thomas Krane describes his working relationship with Hyde as “a highly engaged partnership.” The pair speaks every other week, and Hyde describes Krane as “a confidant and friend” who is never too busy to make time for him.
“TK has been nothing short of magnificent,” says Hyde. “He knows when to lean in and when to challenge. He’s an incredible sounding board. He makes himself readily available but doesn’t obstruct the business.”
“The evolution of the product has come under James’s watch: revamping the team, the go-to-market, the brand, and the product. That’s led to a meaningful reacceleration in revenue while also driving cash flow,” says Krane.
Many CEOs are talented operators, but Hyde also has a knack for getting the best out of his people. Krane explains: “He’s one of the best I’ve ever worked with as a CEO, and has done this all in partnership with the original founders.” Berlind and Goldman both remain active board members, with Berlind acting as Executive Chairman.
Snappt has leveraged Insight’s Onsite for everything from recruitment to AI strategy to acquisition intelligence. Onsite is a team of 100+ in-house experts that help Insight portfolio companies scale and grow. “They network, and they connect,” says Hyde. Nelson also cites DRIVE, Insight Partners’ exclusive, invitation-only event which brings together aligned software leaders from across our portfolio for two days of actionable strategies, candid conversations, and network-building.
Hyde turned to Onsite to raise the talent bar at Snappt as the company grew. From choosing an executive search partner to sitting in on interviews, suggesting talent from the wider portfolio, and even negotiating contracts, Krane and Onsite’s Andrew Dunn, VP of executive talent, were there every step of the way. “Helping define and show what good looks like for a business becomes a lot easier when they have a great story to tell and a high-energy CEO telling it,” says Dunn. “With Snappt, we were able to get involved from the start, helping scope specific roles, selecting a search partner, and making candidate introductions. This level of partnership and alignment really helps drive the quality of the hire you end up with.”
“[Investors] always tout their ability to help you find talent,” says Hyde. “It’s easy to say but not easy to deliver. But we have leaned pretty heavily on Insight.”
“We need to continue to disrupt ourselves”
Snappt has a complex sales strategy, forming partnerships with some competitor organizations. “Insight’s provided a ton of value,” says Nelson. Nelson cites Onsite’s support in establishing Snappt’s channel partner strategy, whereby their technology is sold by third parties such as TransUnion.
“We’ve been able to go to Insight with complex problems, and they’ve been able to offer solutions.”
Nelson says the mentorship from Krane and VP Rachel Harkins was invaluable when Snappt acquired the rental-verification startup Trigo in August 2025.
“Snappt as a business had never made an acquisition before [Trigo],” he says. “Seventy percent or more of acquisitions fail and go sideways. Being able to lean on [Insight] through our acquisition cycle, I think, ultimately led to the successful acquisition of Trigo.” This acquisition proved to be “the shining star for this business,” generating a five-fold increase in revenue over the past year.
“Capturing the verification of rent was incredibly important,” says Hyde. “If you really want to understand if someone’s going to pay their rent in the future, ask: Did they pay it in the past? It’s a lot of work for leasing agents to pick up the phone and chase after the prior landlords. So, we have a tool leveraging agentic AI.”
“For multifamily operators, it’s not just about the lost revenue, it’s the pain it is to actually get that person out,” says Hyde. Evictions are time-consuming and expensive; they can cost upwards of $15,000 to have a fraudulent tenant removed. “It’s critically important to stop those people at the front door so they never gain entry into the home.”
Snappt now works across 2.5 million institutionally owned apartment units, and Hyde believes it will hit 6 million total applicant verifications by the end of 2026. Snappt holds its AI-driven document fraud detection to some of the highest standards in the industry, and the technology is even being used to tackle “inception fraud” whereby fraudsters create an entirely fabricated identity, with a faked full financial history. The business has stopped more than $1.9B in potential bad debt to date.
Hyde now plans to go after more of the rental market in the U.S., tripling its addressable market to 45 million units, and may eventually expand into adjacent categories or overseas.
“We need to continue to disrupt ourselves,” he says. “We have the right to win because we have the scale, we have the brand, we have the customers. So, our world is just: How do we action this even faster?”
*Editor’s note: Insight Partners has invested in Snappt.
