![]() ![]() Now it is announcing the completion of its $2.6 million seed funding led by Los Angeles–based early-stage VC firm MaC Venture Capital. Then in July, it became the first African startup to join New York’s MetaProp Accelerator. This March, the company announced a pre-seed investment of $625,000. Spleet’s growth has courted investors’ attention. To them, paying a premium on monthly or quarterly rent beats saving up cumulatively less than that for yearly rent. Many of Spleet’s customers are middle- to high-income earners (paying between $200 and $1,000 monthly). It also became clear there was a great demand for its subscription-based product - it has had over 68,000 unfulfilled requests since launching - even though apartments listed on its platform can be pricey for the average renter in Lagos. This process allowed the four-year-old startup to establish good unit economics and significant traction before scaling, Adesanmi noted. The founders bootstrapped Spleet for 18 months before conducting a family and friend round of $265,000. “So instead of going out and raising venture capital, we decided that we were going to bootstrap because we could convince some landlords to list their homes on this platform that we had built and derisk some of their problems.” It was the landlords who needed convincing, but it helped that we already had a network of landlords,” said CEO Adesanmi in an interview with TechCrunch on the company’s takeoff. “Our solution on the tenant side was a no-brainer. ![]() This relationship also supplied Spleet with the critical network of landlords required to list multiple units when it went live the pitch to landlords was that Spleet would bring proper KYC into the rental process and allow them to verify tenants and automate rent collection. While Adesanmi worked for years in Nigeria’s banking and fintech space, his family’s real estate background pushed him to establish a startup in proptech. In 2018, he and Akintola Adesanmi - who was no stranger to how rent worked in Nigeria and also desired to effect change - brainstormed Spleet, a platform that partners with apartment owners to list their properties and offers renters options to pay rent monthly, quarterly and biannually. But in effect, renters are placed in a precarious position of finding their first lump sum for the first year’s rent and subsequently saving some money from their salary for the following rent.ĭolapo Adebayo encountered this problem while searching for an apartment after returning to Nigeria from the U.K. Landlords in the city, like any in Nigeria, have stuck to accepting rent in this manner for decades because they find monthly payments unsustainable to them, annual up-front fees reduce administrative costs and the chances of renters defaulting. Not only is rent expensive - low- to middle-income housing can cost between $1,000 and $5,000 yearly - but renters must also pay a year in advance, sometimes even two before moving in. For the average individual living in Lagos - Nigeria’s most populous city, with over 20 million people - apartment hunting is an extreme sport. ![]()
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