Spleet To The Rescue: The cost of living and housing deficit in developing African cities like Lagos has been a significant concern for an average Nigerian. Many resorts to squatting with family and friends due to high upfront rental requests, making life somewhat unbearable for these salary earners. Those who can afford for the moment find it difficult to uphold and fulfill future obligations as inflation rises.
Spleet, a Nigeria prop-tech startup, is changing this narrative with its drive to provide tenants with affordable loans to help them pay their rent.
The startup has raised $625,000 in an oversubscribed pre-seed funding round led by MetaProp VC, including participants like Future Africa, FEDHA Capital, VFD Group, Moonshot VC, HoaQ, Squarefoot CEO Jonathan Wassersturm, Flutterwave CEO Olugbenga ‘GB’ Agboola, and others.
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What to Know About Spleet
The startup was founded in 2018 by Tola Adesanmi from the need to find rentals with flexible payment options in Lagos as against the usual one or two year upfront payment options by landlords.
Spleet allows homeowners to rent their apartments to vetted individuals while connecting people searching for apartments to verified houses. The startups also enable tenants to pay their rent monthly through automated rent collection.
The co-founder and CEO of Spleet, Tola Adesanmi, revealed in a statement that —
“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.”
Providing Affordable Loans for Nigerians to Pay Their Rent
The Startup intends to use the funding to build its newest rent financing product – “Rent Now Pay Later” – and other products that will enable a seamless residential rental process. The new product will give tenants access to affordable loans to pay rent.
Still talking about the launch of the marketplace and new product, Adesanmi added — “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.”
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Co-founder and general partner at MetaProp, Zachary Evans, said that the startup had distinguished itself as the best in-demand product within Nigeria’s “nascent and exploding” prop-tech sector.
“It remains tough 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 prop-tech market,” he explained.