OEN NewsA Market-Driven Solution for Housing Stability: OneApp and Founder Tyrone Poole’s Story of Resilience
Entrepreneurship wasn’t originally part of Tyrone Poole‘s initial career and life plan. But some of the most important ideas are born from adversity and sudden changes, as Poole learned firsthand. After suffering a severe injury during firefighter training, he found himself homeless after a hospital stint. “I was in the hospital for nine months to recover,” Poole says. “I learned the hard way how difficult it is to re-enter society after disappearing.”
Poole was faced with an eviction and car repossession, leaving him to rely on shelters and public services to help him find housing. Figuring out how to navigate a fragmented and often frustrating system was the biggest hurdle, Poole says. He’d find a home to apply for, scrape together the application fee, and then be denied due to algorithms and checklists that don’t take a person’s full situation into account.
Poole eventually walked by a location available for rent and was quickly accepted after applying. Curious about what had finally helped him breakthrough, he asked the owner what helped him secure the rental. Her response was simple: “You fit our criteria.”
That experience planted a seed for Poole that has grown into an award-winning startup changing lives and aiming to help house 1 million people by 2032. Poole’s interactions with the nonprofit and government support services available to those experiencing homelessness showed him a confusing, overburdened system. Government support often complicates already complex situations, and nonprofits are frequently spread too thin to be effective for a large group of people.
What was needed was a market-driven solution, and Poole’s own experiences positioned him to build something new. As quoted in his 2018 TEDx talk, “The people who don’t even know what the box looks like, always think outside of it.”
Poole says around 80% of applications for housing get denied initially. This creates a huge group of people in need of support at a level incredibly hard for the current system to manage. “The goal was to create something that allows renters to self-resolve their issues without relying on outside help,” Poole explains. He founded OneApp based on a simple idea: you meet the criteria, you get housing.
OneApp’s initial mission was to provide more transparency for renters in the application process. It has since grown to a solution that helps renters get approved without asking property managers to take on more risk. OneApp offers second-chance approval assistance for renters, a lease support service for property managers, and a specific solution for housing-focused nonprofits. When more people can get housed without leaning on government services or nonprofit programs, those systems are able to better catch and get resources to those who otherwise fall through the cracks.
Since launching in 2015, OneApp has been on a powerful growth trajectory. The company was the winner of OEN’s Trailblazer Award in 2025, and has seen massive returns for investors. OneApp currently has around 85 employees with plans to grow to a staff of 110 in 2027. The team is in the process of finalizing office space in downtown Portland on the waterfront.
The company’s vision has evolved, too. In addition to getting more folks into housing, OneApp now aims to become an end-to-end lease support service that creates stability and keeps renters in their spaces long term. The mission moving forward is to collaboratively develop security and infrastructure to help renters find resources and stay qualified for housing.
“I’m very proud of the culture at OneApp,” Poole says. “One hundred percent of our people believe we’re going to hit our goals and really change housing stability forever.”
Poole’s own path since launching OneApp has been transformative. He’s gone from sleeping on a broken cot at a shelter to a nationally recognized entrepreneur and TEDx speaker. He balances a busy schedule as a founder and CEO with being a father of five daughters, and names family as his top priority. Poole says his goal for OneApp’s next five years is to become a household name and keep pushing their mission.
“The big vision is to literally change the way we view access to housing, because the current system doesn’t work,” he says. “We have to redesign it. That’s what OneApp does.”
Produced by A.wordsmith for OEN
