Navigate Ventures’ portfolio companies represent exceptional innovators leveraging cutting edge technologies and AI to address complex challenges across industries, society, and global supply chains. We work closely with our portfolio CEOs to help them achieve their strategic goals, scale effectively, and secure successful growth financing, delivering strong value creation for our limited partners. 

Through our regular Charting the Course series, we talk to founders and leaders who’ve scaled, rebuilt, or reimagined companies in tough markets, to lift the lid on what it really takes to go the distance in tech.

In this edition, Ivan Nikkhoo sat down with Matt Wetrich, CEO of Navigate Ventures Portfolio Company Stellar – An AI-enabled property maintenance marketplace helping institutional and mid-sized landlords manage repairs and contractor workflows more efficiently. 

From investment banking to Uber, Veho, and now Stellar, Matt’s journey has spanned corporate finance, hyperscale ops, and vertical SaaS transformation. He joined Stellar not as a founder, but as a CEO parachuted into crisis – and helped steer it from the brink of collapse to rapid growth and sustainable product-market fit. 

Let’s start at the beginning. Can you walk us through your background and how you ended up leading Stellar? 

I started off in investment banking at BofA Merrill Lynch. I was there for three years, and my mindset even then was: how do I automate my job? Not everyone appreciated that. A few of the senior guys told me to stop innovating and just do the work! 

So, I moved on, and I got into Big Data, building a healthcare analytics company that looked at asthma and COPD admissions driven by weather patterns. That was a three-year run. But I always wanted to be part of the Silicon Valley ecosystem. So eventually I shut that down and joined Uber in San Francisco. 

At Uber I worked across a few teams, but the most notable was leading the incubation and scale team in the Eats business. We helped launch alcohol delivery and the advertising business, which is now over a billion dollars in run rate. After that, I joined Veho as one of the first 15 people. It’s a tech-driven marketplace for package delivery, and we scaled 15x in two years. I was running US in-market operations.

A mentor of mine brought Stellar to my attention. The core business had good variable margins and a super interesting problem space. It reminded me of Veho and Uber in that it was very operational. I like tackling these very everyday, blue-collar problems with technology. 

You weren’t the founder. What was it like stepping in as CEO during a moment of crisis? 

It’s a really good question. Nobody wants their founder to leave. Some of the best companies in the world are what they are because they kept the founder in the seat. So stepping in is bittersweet. 

I’d been running ops and some of the sales team at Stellar, and the board asked me to step in. Within 24 hours I had to let go of 70% of the company, including the leadership team. Not a great way to start. 

You build trust by getting wins, by asking for help, by showing up and putting yourself out there. But it’s hard. The hardest part was earning the trust of the employees. There wasn’t a high degree of confidence we were going to make it – myself included. We had a path forward, but it was tenuous and risky. We didn’t have much capital or runway. We had a lot of stuff to fix. 

What were the biggest challenges? And where did you find opportunity? 

The big one was liquidity. We were burning a million dollars a month and had raised an emergency round already. Our core business was solid. Somewhere around 40-50% of homes in America are rented. Shelter always breaks and always needs maintenance. That’s not going away.

But strategically, we were trying to do 106 different trades in every market – drywall, concrete, you name it. That’s impossible to balance in a marketplace. Uber has whole teams of data scientists to balance their different business lines. We needed to focus on a core set of trades, so we narrowed it down to about six or seven. 

Operationally, the company was just in bad shape. The communication was poor. The culture was poor. The strategy was wrong. We had to make the company again, from the ground up, and we knew there was a real business there if we could just get back to basics and grow the client base. 

This is a pretty old-school industry. How do you take advantage of new cost-saving technologies like AI without losing the human side? 

It’s still construction and maintenance. Still a handshake and look-you-in-the-eye business in many ways. But we use AI to find the right clients. We identify single-family property managers with a strong online presence, tag them, score them, and deliver high-intent leads to our team. Then we show up in person. With donuts. 

We also use AI for accounts receivable – recognizing invoice cycles and spotting anomalies. We use it to source contractors too, across about 20 different channels. 

From the client’s point of view, none of this matters. They don’t care that we’re using AI. They care that their problem gets solved, and it gets solved fast. That’s it. 

Who are your competitors, and what’s your go-to-market focus now? 

There are a few major providers that operate within the same space as us, but to be honest, most of our competition are mom & pop shops and individual plumbers or roofers or garage door techs that operate out of their truck. They just want to do good work, and have leads come to them, without having to go out and sell. We help them do that. 

On the client side, we work with nine of the top ten REITs and property managers in the country. But the smaller and mid-size guys are better clients in a lot of ways. Less price sensitive, with more need, and they’re underserved by the market right now. The big players chase the whales. We want to serve the rest.

What does the roadmap look like, and how do you think about growing the value of the company and addressing investors’ interests? 

We’re building out a more proactive managed marketplace. Right now, it’s mostly managed. Next up is making more jobs self-claimable, like Uber. That involves a lot of pricing and liquidity work. 

Contractor scoring will get more advanced. Headcount won’t scale linearly. If we triple revenue, I don’t want to triple headcount – it should be 20-30% max. 

Every month that goes by, you're seeing us get more operationally efficient. We’re also looking at more cutting edge-technologies like AI accent masking for offshore support. It’s crazy how well it works. You can have a plumber in Malaysia sound like a Texan. It has the potential to remove friction, level the playing field, and make us a 24/7 business without 24/7 costs. 

These are some of the things that are helpful to increase revenue, increase our multiples, and thus increase returns for our investors and our shareholders. 

Final question. What advice would you give to someone building a vertical SaaS company today? 

Firstly, capital is precious. Treat every dollar like it’s your own. At Uber, we’d compete to launch new markets spending as little as possible. Six-inch Subway sandwiches and $39 motels. 

Secondly, don’t chase the flavour of the day. Build something solid. AI is a real tool, but don’t let the buzz dictate your business. 

Thirdly, work hard, but don’t fake it. Fake work is meetings about meetings. My calendar was full of those. We cleared them. Now if I call my team, they answer, because they’re doing real work, not sitting in back-to-back 30-minute Zooms. 

Give your team time back. It works wonders. 

About Matt Wetrich 

Matt Wetrich is a seasoned operator and tech executive with a background in finance, logistics, and venture-backed startups. He began his career in investment banking before transitioning into the tech sector, where he held key roles at Uber and Veho, gaining deep experience in operations, growth, and strategic leadership. 

Matt is currently the CEO of Stellar, an AI-powered property maintenance platform focused on modernizing how large property owners manage home repairs and services. Under his leadership, Stellar is navigating a critical phase of transformation, steering the company through operational restructuring during a liquidity crunch. Matt holds a degree in Finance and brings a hands-on, data-driven approach to scaling businesses in highly competitive markets. 

His career reflects a strong focus on building efficient systems, leading high-performing teams, and driving innovation in proptech and logistics. 

About Ivan Nikkhoo

Ivan Nikkhoo is the Founder and Managing Partner of Navigate Ventures, an early growth fund specializing in partnering with exceptional B2B Enterprise SaaS companies outside Silicon Valley between Series A and Growth rounds. Navigate employs a risk-mitigated strategy designed to achieve a short holding period and an accelerated path to Distributions to Paid-In Capital (DPI). A sought-after speaker, Ivan frequently shares his insights at venture capital and family office conferences globally and is a regular contributor to several leading industry publications.

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