Vantaca

Bootstrapped to $10M, Scaled to $1.25B — The HOA Software Unicorn No One Saw Coming

February 21, 2026

~$100M+ ARR

Revenue

500+ mgmt cos

Customers

2017

Founded

JMI + Cove Hill

Investors

$300M raised

Raised

What Vantaca Does

Vantaca is the operating system for professional community association management companies — the businesses that run HOAs, condo associations, and other common-interest communities across the United States.

The platform handles the full operational stack for management companies:

Accounting & financials — general ledger, dues collection, invoice payments
Vendor management — coordinating contractors and service providers
Homeowner communication — portals, notices, violation tracking
Reporting & compliance — board reporting, audit trails
AI automation — billing agents, call handling, document processing (via HOAi)

With over 500 management company customers managing 50,000+ communities and six million homes, Vantaca has become the dominant vertical SaaS platform for an industry touching roughly 75 million Americans.

The Problem They Solve

Living in an HOA or condo building looks simple from the outside: pay dues, get notices, call about a broken gate. Behind the scenes, it's a different story.

Management companies running these communities were — and many still are — drowning in manual processes:

Paper checks mailed to clubhouses
Spreadsheet-based accounting across dozens of communities
Phone calls to resolve every billing dispute
No centralized vendor management
Outdated software built by people who had never managed an HOA

Dave Sweyer, founder of Vantaca, lived this problem firsthand. He ran Community Association Management Services (CAMS), one of the larger HOA management firms in the country.

After failing to find software capable of running his business properly, he did what operators do when the market fails them: he built it himself.

Watch: Ben Currin (Vantaca CEO) on Bootstrapping to $10M Then 10x-ing to a $1.25B Unicorn

Vantaca Growth Journey — From HOA Frustration to $1.25B Unicorn

The Growth Story

2017–2018: Building From the Inside

Dave Sweyer started writing the first lines of Vantaca code in 2017, using his own management company as the beta customer. No outside users. No paid pilots. Just a founder eating his own cooking.

Ben Currin — a Naval Academy graduate and former submarine officer — joined in early 2018. He had zero background in HOA management. What he did have: a sharp eye for “sneaky big” markets: boring verticals with massive transaction volumes, sticky workflows, and software that hadn't been touched in decades.

2018–2022: Bootstrap to Product-Market Fit

Their first year generated roughly $300,000 in revenue. By 2019, they had crossed $1M ARR. No paid ads, no growth hacking.

Dave's deep network in community association management opened the first doors. But the real engine was customer results. Early wins — large management companies with measurable operational improvements — became live showrooms.

Prospective customers weren't reading case studies. They were touring actual businesses running Vantaca.

For five years, they reinvested everything back into the product. By 2022, Vantaca had bootstrapped to high single-digit millions in ARR with:

A lean, capital-efficient team
A 95% customer retention rate
A reputation as the only modern platform built for serious management companies
Five consecutive years on the Inc. 5000

2022: First Institutional Capital — On Their Terms

In 2022, Vantaca raised a minority investment from JMI Equity — deliberately keeping majority control.

The logic was deliberate: they knew the playbook worked, and they wanted to pour fuel without giving up the house. Within two years of that raise, Vantaca:

Added nearly 60 employees (more than half in product and engineering)
Expanded from core SaaS into payments, treasury, and vendor management
Grew revenue roughly 10x

2024: The AI Acquisition That Skipped Two Years of Building

In November 2024, Vantaca acquired HOAi — a Y Combinator-backed AI startup founded by Haoyu Zha — for an undisclosed sum.

HOAi brought agentic AI capabilities that immediately went to work:

Automated billing execution and invoice payment
AI voice agents handling inbound homeowner calls
Automated report generation
Document processing at scale

Within months, HOAi was processing over one million automated tasks, saving management companies more than 100,000 hours of manual labor. Almost every new Vantaca customer onboards both products together.

2025: Unicorn

In October 2025, Cove Hill Partners led a $300M+ minority investment valuing Vantaca at $1.25 billion. JMI Equity rolled its stake.

From a nuclear engineer and an HOA operator — no funding, no VC connections, no desire to build something “sexy” — Vantaca had become a unicorn.

Key Growth Tactics

1. Own the Unsexy Vertical

Vantaca didn't compete on sex appeal. Ben Currin was deliberate: he looked for markets that were “sneaky big.”

His checklist:

Large transaction volumes hiding in plain sight
Sticky, workflow-heavy operations
Underserved by modern software
A payments or financial services component baked in

Community associations fit every criterion. The 75 million Americans living in HOAs represent an enormous recurring dues flow — but the software market was a graveyard of legacy tools no one loved. That's the setup for a vertical SaaS land grab.

2. Eat Your Own Cooking

Dave Sweyer didn't just understand the market intellectually — he ran it. Vantaca's very first customer was his own management company, CAMS.

This gave them two advantages no competitor could replicate:

Immediate, unfiltered feedback loops — the founder felt every product gap personally
Instant social proof — early enterprise prospects could see the platform running a real business at scale

The founder's own company was the original case study.

3. Delay Capital Until the Playbook Is Proven

Vantaca took no institutional capital for five years. By the time JMI wrote a check in 2022, the team knew exactly what every dollar would produce.

Ben described it clearly: every dollar reinvested produced five to ten out “within a pretty short period of time.”

Raising earlier would have meant giving up equity to learn what they already figured out the hard way. Bootstrapping forced product discipline and revealed the real unit economics — before outside stakeholders had a say.

4. Expand Revenue to Build a Moat

The SaaS subscription was the beachhead. The moat came from touching every financial transaction in the ecosystem:

Payments — inbound dues from homeowners, outbound invoices to vendors
Treasury services — connecting management companies to HOA bank deposits
Vendor management — end-to-end contractor coordination
AI automation — billing agents, call handling, document processing

By the time a competitor arrives with a cheaper SaaS subscription, the management company is running its entire financial operation through Vantaca. The switching cost is enormous.

5. Acquire, Don't Build, When AI Disrupts

Rather than spin up an internal AI team during the generative AI wave, Vantaca acquired HOAi — a YC-backed company with deep domain knowledge and a working agentic AI product.

What the acquisition instantly added:

AI voice agents handling homeowner calls
Automated billing and invoice payment agents
Document processing at scale
Report generation without human intervention

Capabilities that would have taken years to build in-house were live within months. One million automated tasks. 100,000+ hours saved.

Key Takeaways for Builders

✓Unsexy vertical markets with large transaction volumes are hiding massive SaaS opportunities — community associations alone represent 75M Americans.
✓Build your beta product for your own company first: Dave Sweyer ran an HOA management firm before writing a single line of Vantaca code.
✓Bootstrap to product-market fit before raising. Vantaca took zero outside capital until $5-10M ARR, when they knew every dollar in produced multiples out.
✓Anchor on enterprise customers early. Their first logos managed 50,000+ homes each — those reference customers became live showrooms for sales.
✓Expand revenue systematically: SaaS first (60%+ of revenue), then payments, treasury, vendor management, and finally AI to cement the moat.
✓When AI becomes available, acquire your way in. The HOAi YC acquisition in 2024 put Vantaca 2 years ahead of building in-house.