Spleet – a Nigerian-owned prop-tech has raised the sum of $625,000 in a pre-seed funding round to aid in its new product launch.
The round which is an oversubscribed pre-seed round was 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 company which was founded in 2018 by Tola Adesanmi with the goal of finding rentals with flexible payment options for residents in Lagos as against the annual or biannual upfront payment options has said that funds raised will be used to build Spleet’s newest rent financing product – “Rent Now Pay Later”.
It also added that it will build other products to enable seamless residential rental processes.
The new product will give tenants access to affordable loans to pay rent. The startup m enables landlords to verify and vet tenants, and also automates rent collections.
Speaking on the funds raised, Adesanmi said, “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,” Adesanmi added.
Speaking on the new product, “Rent Now, Pay Later”, Adesanmi said the product which is currently in its beta testing stage will help tenants get homes with as little as 1-2 month rent worth of savings.
“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”, he said.
“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 defined 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.
