(The Southern African Times) – Nigerian prop-tech startup Spleet has raised a US$625,000 pre-seed funding round to help it roll out a new product that provides tenants with affordable loans to help them pay their rent.
Founded by Tola Adesanmi in 2018 from the need to find rentals with flexible payment options in Lagos as opposed to the usual one or two year upfront payment options, Spleet allows homeowners to rent to vetted individuals, while also helping people easily find places to stay. The startup enables landlords to verify and vet tenants, and also automates rent collections.
Spleet has now raised US$625,000 in an oversubscribed pre-seed round led by MetaProp VC, and also including Future Africa, FEDHA Capital, VFD Group, Moonshot VC, HoaQ, Squarefoot CEO Jonathan Wassersturm, Flutterwave CEO Olugbenga ‘GB’ Agboola, and others.
The funding will be used to build Spleet’s newest rent financing product – “Rent Now Pay Later” – and other products to enable seamless residential rental processes. The new product will give tenants access to affordable loans to pay rent.
“After launching a marketplace in 2019, we realised that the issues in our rental market were beyond what our marketplace could solve. Affordability is one of the biggest pain points for tenants. Most tenants earn income monthly and can therefore not afford the 1-2 years burden of paying their rent in advance,” said Adesanmi.
“We decided to change this by building a financing solution, “Rent Now, Pay Later”, to help tenants get homes with as little as 1-2 months rent worth of savings. We are currently in beta testing our rent now, pay later product with a select number of tenants and we are happy with the results so far. We will extend this to a wider market of tenants and potential tenants in the coming months.”
Zachary Evans, co-founder and general partner at MetaProp, said Spleet had distinguished itself as a best in class product within the “nascent and exploding” prop-tech sector in Nigeria.
“It remains extraordinarily difficult to rent apartments efficiently and we believe Spleet will create a massive business by removing this friction. We are very excited about our investment in Spleet and our broader entrance into the West African proptech market,” he said.
