No one likes dealing with inspection or repair service agencies. They take forever, are hard to communicate with and are inconsistent.

Today, Public Housing Authorities are resource constrained. Families sometimes have to wait 6 months for the inspection process to be completed before they are permitted to move into a home.

This contributes greatly to the problem of homelessness in America. Landlords in turn wait for 6 months losing rent in the process. This aggravates the problem by reducing the availability of affordable housing in many markets.

Currently, many housing authorities don’t provide call center based support at scale. People often have to drive to the Housing Authorities to meet with their caseworkers. This is needless effort, and BoodsKapper is here to address that.

By using advanced work optimization techniques to significantly improve inspector/technician efficiencies, BoodsKapper strives to increase productivity, cost savings and improve engagement with landlords, technicians and clients.  

 They provide managers with real-time visibility into inspection operations and supply improved customer service to both clients and landlords.

 BoodsKapper makes an AI-based virtual office assistant that can assign the right work order, to the right technician, quickly interact with the customer, and provide conversational reporting.  

 They are currently focused on the Public Housing Market, where the software is trained to handle Housing Choice Voucher inspections and related customer support. The federal Housing Choice Voucher Program plays a critical role in helping to address housing needs for extremely low-income families.

 Its most important advantage is that vouchers give recipients the freedom to choose the kinds of housing and locations that best meet their needs.  As a result, many voucher beneficiaries live in healthy neighborhoods that offer social, educational, and economic opportunities for themselves and their children.  

BoodsKapper is focused on increasing the efficiency of the agencies responsible for providing these families with a better future. As an example, one of their clients, the Dallas Housing Authority recently reported a 30% increase in productivity, 20% in cost savings and their engagement with landlords and clients has improved significantly.

BoodsKapper has developed a SaaS (software as a service) platform that directly addresses the organizational cause of many issues within the service industry and can prove itself to be adaptable in many markets.  

BoodsKapper is a SaaS company that charges its clients for their use of the software. Their platform provides opportunities for them to charge the customer for peripheral services. For example, landlords get the opportunity to lease new voucher recipients who are seeking customer services from BK. Pricing is based on the number of users and the number of vouchers.

To date, the company has been able to get a mix of one year of SaaS fees and setup fees, which offset CAC. While we imagine getting paid by public housing authorities could prove challenging, if cost savings continue to be a result of Boodskapper, we imagine the fees for their service will be accepted by a broader swath of public housing agencies.

The Public Housing market is assessed to be worth around $100M based on annual recurring revenue (ARR).

Although BoodsKapper is currently only focusing on this segment, their platform has the ability to be adopted across various vendor sectors such as HVAC, locksmiths, etc. which would provide opportunities for significant scale.  

The chart above provides insight into the markets that they could enter in the future. At their core BK is a SaaS company and can take their service to other markets in need of organizational help, but right now they are focused on developing and implementing a successful hold in public housing.

BoodsKapper has differentiated themselves as being the best at assigning the right work order to the right technician, interacting with customer, and providing conversational reporting.

Assigning the right work order to the right technician: This function is required in any office with employees who carry out work orders. There are a lot of classical software options such as Field Edge, Service Titan, Yardi, and SAP that solve this problem.

BoodsKapper’s difference is that they take a machine learning approach to the solution. As an example, their software is able to significantly improve inspector productivity in Public Housing Authorities (e.g. the Dallas Housing Authority reported inspector productivity increased by 30%). The inspectors drive less, gets stuck in traffic less, and since the software coordinates appointments, no-shows are reduced from about 20% to less than 1%.

Interact with the Customer: Technician work often involves coordination with a counterparty. In the case of a housing choice voucher inspection, there are two parties the software has to coordinate with – the landlord who intends to rent or is renting the apartment, and the client who is using the voucher to live in an apartment. This is the bot side of BoodsKapper’s software. They were able to have near human-level interactions with the landlords and clients.

Unlike an app with a limited number of icons that a user can interact with, the BoodsKapper application is open-ended. It constantly learns what the clients and tenants require and trains the natural language processing software to add these features. Since there are no UI changes to be made, these improvements to the production software happen almost every day.

Provide Conversational reporting: All reporting for the management is also done conversationally. Users are able to ask the application anything they want to know and get the answers immediately. For example, a Housing Choice Voucher Vice President may want to know how many inspectors are on the road at any time and can ask this question on a Siri-like interface and get the answer.

The above three skills of the virtual employee are required across a wide variety of industries. For example, the BoodsKapper software is currently being used by a food distributor, where the primary use case is to interact with the external warehouse managers/customers and provide conversational reporting.

Bejoy Narayana, CEO: Bejoy has 20 years of IT experience in the areas of ERP (enterprise resource planning) Systems and AI.  He is an expert in the area of supply chain management in multiple industries. He was previously an Associate Partner at IBM in charge of building and delivering SAP and cognitive computing systems to IBM’s clients.  He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Kerala University, India, and an MBA from NYU’s Stern School of Management.

Kw Leong, CTO: KW is an exceptionally talented programmer who has over 14 years of experience in software development.  He began his career working as a software engineer at Motorola.

His experience includes programmer and team lead roles on several large scale business transformation programs.  He holds a Bachelor of Science Degree in Computer Engineering from the University at Buffalo.

1. AI’s Potential: Artificial Intelligence is changing the way we live in so many ways. It is streamlining and organizing processes that were previously complicated and inefficient. By working in conjunction with existing technology, AI services like Apple’s Siri, IBM’s Watson, and Amazon’s Alexa, have brought change in the ways that people complete tasks and interact with organizational technologies.

Instead of having to rely on human management, AI has granted people the ability to transfer low-skill and overwhelmingly banal assignments to a technology that can manage it for them and present it in a clear and efficient way.

BoodsKapper aims to become an all in one platform for task and organizational efficiency and to capitalize on the benefits that Artificial Intelligence presents to a variety of markets. They have already established a working and proven model with clients in the Public Housing industry, and are poised for success if they can continue to develop a scalable product.

2. The Market: Public Housing is a market ready for disruption. The level of technology adoption is very low and the industry is ready for change. It is unorganized, inefficient, and because of this, people aren’t receiving the best care that they can receive, and agencies are not providing to their potential.

There is time lost in this process and as an example, tenants and landlords usually drive to their local housing authority office to get any customer service. BoodsKapper is helping their clients leapfrog generations of technology adoption.

3. The Team: Bejoy worked at IBM as an Associate Partner in their Global Business Services in the Supply Chain service area. This is where he learned about Watson, specifically, and what AI can do in the world of business. After working in this area for several years, Bejoy left IBM to found BoodsKapper. His experience with IBM and KW’s 15 years of programming knowledge from Motorola have combined to create a powerful idea that is set to change the public housing industry for the better.

Deal to Watch

BoodsKapper is a Deal to Watch. The team has done great already by developing and successfully acquiring clients within their targeted industry – this including the Dallas Housing Authority. Their SaaS platform is positioned and structured in a way that it has the ability to be extremely scalable at full potential.  

This among other reasons is why their most likely exit option will be acquisition. They have created an AI model for Enterprise organization and with that comes a multitude of options for adoption.

The challenge for BoodsKapper will be continuing to sell through the public housing market. First off, the market is not huge, with an estimation of a $100M market. Even at the top end with 30%+ adoption, that only represents a $30M or so opportunity.

Sales cycles and willingness to pay in a sector that is so cash strapped and slow to adopt change will be an uphill battle hampering growth of the top line. At the same time, with a focus on really improving any customer / task oriented industries such as HVAC, wider spread adoption and upside can be experienced.

At the same time this requires larger sales teams, new learnings and customizations to fit the needs of these new market participants. There is still a lot of uncertainty around what adoption will look like in these new markets. With an experienced tech team, but less entrepreneurial team, it could be a continued struggle to sell through so many varied organizations.

However, with an opportunity to play in the conversational bot market, which has seen hundreds of millions of dollars poured into the space, we think the team is building an intriguing technology that meets a specific need and could be ripe for acquisition down the road.

BoodsKapper provides a logical solution to the majority of organizational enterprise issues in not only the housing market, but in a number of industries.