Ember

Kurt Averall is a serial entrepreneur who built Canopy, an accounting practice management SaaS, from inception to scale, raising $70 million in venture capital before exiting in 2019. After taking a sabbatical, he returned to his roots—his family has been a generational home builder in Lake Arrowhead, California, building second homes for decades. This background gave Kurt insight into a fundamental problem: second home owners typically use their properties only 6-8 weeks per year, yet still bear the burden of property management, maintenance, and costs. Buying a vacation home outright is expensive, while traditional rentals like Airbnb are costly and lack ownership equity. Ember emerged as the solution—fractional ownership of high-end vacation homes.

Ember's model sits between Airbnb and full home ownership. The company purchases high-end vacation homes (typically $2-8 million depending on location), furnishes them with premium finishes and amenities, then divides each home into eight ownership shares. Buyers can purchase 1-8 shares, giving them exclusive access to 5-52 weeks per year at a much lower price point than buying outright. For example, one-eighth ownership of a $1.8M Palm Springs home costs $224,560. The company operates with five engineers among a 30-person team and launched operations 10 months before the interview.

Ember closed a combined $17.4 million seed and Series A financing in February (described as "just announced together")—$2.4M seed and $15M Series A, with Peter Thiel leading the A round. This capital fueled inventory acquisition. The company also secured approximately $20-30 million in debt financing to acquire homes, using the real estate itself as collateral—a critical advantage over typical SaaS/fintech warehouse facilities. Within 10 months, over 100 families had purchased shares. Kurt emphasized the company had "more of an issue keeping up with demand on the buy side" than selling inventory—a favorable position.

Ember's monetization model proved strong: The company takes a 12% uplift on the home purchase price plus furnishings (typically $250-300K per property). A 4M home plus 300K furnishing marked up 12% generates $516K in one-time revenue. On the recurring side, Ember charges $100/month per share for platform management (LLC administration, property management, and the scheduling app). With roughly 100 families owning one share each, the company had already hit approximately $10-12K in monthly recurring revenue within 10 months. Kurt noted strong product-market fit: "We've actually had more of an issue keeping up with demand on the buy side." Most buyers were purchasing one share initially, though the newly launched financing partnership (4% rates through a banking partner) was expected to drive multi-share purchases.

The company had moved "tens of millions" of inventory through the platform in 10 months (homes purchased and sold), with $15M in live inventory awaiting sale. This translated to roughly 3.6M in uplift revenue already captured (conservative 30M in volume × 12%).

Ember operates primarily on the West Coast (Oregon, California, Utah) with homes in St. George, Bend, Newport Beach, and Palm Springs. The company is positioned to compete against Picasso (the market leader, focused on ultra-luxury 9-10M+ homes on the coasts) by targeting a broader market segment—making what was available to the top 1% accessible to the top 20-25%. Kurt emphasized the massive addressable market in real estate and the network effects of inventory: whoever builds the largest inventory fastest wins. The team is aggressively expanding East Coast operations while continuing to build out the West Coast. Kurt projected 100%+ confidence in breaking $100M GMV in the current year and expected to 3-5x growth over the next 12 months. The company operates near break-even on cash burn, with equity and debt financing specifically allocated for inventory acquisition and leverage.