Room
Pillar
Empowering Innovation
Crafting the future of the property insurance and real estate ecosystem
A family office born in forensic engineering, betting on the future of property and insurance.
Domain Expertise
Strategic Capital
Proven Operators
Room & Pillar harnesses industry knowledge, investment capital, operational excellence, raw passion and entrepreneurial spirit to solve the greatest challenges facing Property Insurance and Real Estate industries today.
Our Investment Philosophy
We know the industry from the inside.
Most investors study property and insurance from a distance. We built careers inside them. Over eight decades and a million investigations, we learned where the friction lives.
Backing founders, not just companies is our DNA
Early stage investing is a people business. We bring more than capital. We bring pattern recognition, relationships, and operational experience in the exact markets they are disrupting.
We invest where it matters most.
Property is the largest asset class in the world. Insurance protects it. Both are decades behind where technology can take them. This is not a diversified bet. It is a deliberate one.
Scaling Early Stage Companies
[ Recent Partners ]We have been inside over a million properties across all fifty states. We have seen every way a roof fails, a claim gets buried, a system breaks down. Every company in this portfolio exists because we recognized the problem before most investors knew it was one.
Armadillo
Armadillo modernizes the home warranty, protecting homeowners from the repair costs traditional coverage leaves behind. We backed them because they are fixing one of the most frustrating gaps in property ownership, and doing it with a model built for how people actually live.
Source 7
Source7 brings hard data to the repair-or-replace decision that quietly drives billions in property claims. We backed them because they turn guesswork into a defensible call, across underwriting, claims, and subrogation.
Eco Claim
EcoClaim provides the insurance industry with tools to manage, track, and reduce Scope 3 carbon emissions, facilitating the achievement of net‑zero targets in supply chains and revolutionizing the industry’s approach to environmental responsibility.
Our Mission
Room & Pillar is a family office built on eight decades of forensic investigation into property damage across all 50 states and 1+ million claims. We have worked for the property and casualty industry, federal, state, and local governments, litigators, manufacturers and more. That experience powers our passion for finding friction in property insurance and real estate, and backing the early-stage founders solving it with transformative value.
Lyle Donan is the founder of Room & Pillar. He studied Civil and Mining Engineering at Vanderbilt, then the Colorado School of Mines, graduating in 1999, and earned his professional engineering license in 2002. After a year in commercial construction, he joined his father, John Donan Jr., at Donan Engineering, the firm his grandfather founded in 1947. Over the next decade, Lyle specialized in forensic engineering investigations nationwide, serving property insurance companies, FEMA, and legal professionals. Under his leadership, Donan grew from a small family business in Indiana and Kentucky into a national firm with four forensic investigation business lines and more than 400 employees by 2020. His entrepreneurial drive led him to co-found Seek-Now in 2011, seed invest and advise Flyreel starting in 2016, and co-found Source7 in 2018, where he remains Chairman of the Board. After stepping down as CEO of Donan following a 2021 recapitalization, Lyle turned his full attention to Room & Pillar, investing in and advising a portfolio of InsurTech and PropTech companies. He lives in Louisville, Kentucky, with his wife and three children, and spends his free time outdoors in the southern Appalachian Mountains, the Florida coast, and the Colorado Rockies.
Jesse Brink has over a decade of leadership at the intersection of PropTech, InsurTech, and venture capital. He began his software career at EagleView, where he spent six years scaling a core business unit which contributed to the acquisition by Vista Equity Partners. He went on to co-manage a B2B SaaS venture fund at Imagen Capital Partners. A hands-on operator who brings real-world startup-to-exit experience, Jesse actively serves on portfolio company boards and frequently steps into executive GTM and leadership roles, including serving as CEO at ioCurrents. At Room & Pillar, Jesse focuses on property lifecycles, real-estate markets, home warranty and insurance, and next-generation property services. He lives in Woodinville, Washington, with his wife and two children, and spends his time outdoors exploring the Olympic Peninsula and the high desert of Oregon.
We understand the current landscape
We inspire vision
We create value
Powering Innovation,Together
Room & Pillar backs and partners with everyone shaping the future of property insurance and real estate. If that's you, you're in the right room.