The news:
Nigerian property tech startup, Spleet has secured the sum of $2.6 million in a seed round to scale its residential rent-focused products across Africa.
Why it matters:
Spleet was founded in 2018 to build a marketplace that connects landlords with vetted tenants looking for flexible rent payment options. Since its foundation, Spleet has processed millions in rent, housed over 1000 tenants and onboarded over 35 individual and corporate landlords.
The funding would aid Spleet’s plans to expand its product offerings, such as Collect—a service that automatically receives rent payments on behalf of Landlords.
Other products to be expanded are Verify, a tool that enables landlords and real estate agents to carry out adequate background checks on tenants before offering lease agreements and Rent Now Pay Later, a zero collateral, affordable-interest rate rental loan product.
The seed round comes after the company raised the sum of $625,000 in pre-seed funding round to aid its new product launch in July 2022.
What the company is saying:
According to Akintola Adesanmi, CEO of Spleet, “After launching a marketplace in 2019, we realized 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”.
“This funding would go into deepening our product offerings for Landlords, real estate agents and tenants across Nigeria and testing out new markets”, he added.
With Spleet’s new raise, the company intends to address the issues around the urban housing crisis in Africa. This crisis has been one of the heavy challenges plaguing the continent as a whole.
According to Marlon Nichols, co-founder and managing general partner at MaC Venture Capital, “The housing crisis is an enormous problem that impacts us at a global scale, and Africa is no exception”.
“In countries like Nigeria, the requirement for tenants to provide 12 to 24 months of rent payment in advance creates a barrier for large parts of the population in accessing the rental market and essentially renders them homeless”, he added.
Nichols also stated that the partnership with Spleet is a means to bring about a comprehensive solution that would effectively serve both sides of the housing market and combat homelessness.
