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Extra Crunch roundup: Clubhouse UX teardown, YC Demo Day favorites, proptech VC survey, more
Since the pandemic began, I have been pushing the limits of my imagination to try to picture what cities will look and feel like in the coming years.
If your town looks like San Francisco, where I live, it’s a pressing question: Our once-bustling financial district is a ghost town, but even in outer neighborhoods, the number of vacant storefronts is unsettling. People are starting to emerge after sheltering in place for a year, but we are a long way from fully restoring our shared spaces.
What’s going to happen to those semi-vacant office towers, some of which are still under construction? There’s been renewed talk of converting some skyscrapers into residential housing, but there are real economic/logistic hurdles to clear before that can be broadly applied. Scores of restaurants have closed in recent months; who will take over those spaces? I spend a lot of time walking around, and it’s been a long time since I’ve noticed a “Grand Opening” sign.
Seeking answers, Managing Editor Eric Eldon interviewed 10 VCs who are active in proptech and found that most were generally “optimistic.”
Several expressed genuine uncertainty about the future of offices, but most were bullish about prospects for remote work, the rebirth of physical retail and the emergence of “third spaces” that will fill the gap between work and home.
In a companion article on TechCrunch, Eric explores these broader shifts, concluding, “you can start to see a world emerging that sounds a lot more like the fantasies of a New Urbanist than the world before the pandemic.”
Here’s who he interviewed:
- Clelia Warburg Peters, venture partner, Bain Capital Ventures
- Christopher Yip, partner and managing director, RET Ventures
- Zach Aarons, co-founder and general partner, MetaProp
- Casey Berman, general partner, Camber Creek
- Vik Chawla, partner, Fifth Wall
- Adam Demuyakor, co-founder and managing partner, Wilshire Lane Partners
- Robin Godenrath and Julian Roeoes, partners, Picus Capital
- Stonly Baptiste, founding partner, and Shaun Abrahamson, managing partner, Urban Us
- Andrew Ackerman, managing director, Dreamit
Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch this week. Have a great weekend!
Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist
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It’s time to abandon business intelligence tools
Image Credits: Jon Feingersh Photography Inc / Getty Images
Ideally, BI transforms raw data into actionable information, but according to Charles Caldwell, VP of product management at Logi Analytics, “a gap exists between the functionalities provided by current BI and data discovery tools and what users want and need.”
Few BI tools actually integrate with existing workflows and most offer clunky user experiences, “leaving many individuals feeling like they need an advanced computer science degree to actually be able to pull insights out.”
Instead of requiring workers to abandon workflow applications to access data, embedded analytics are more efficient and easier to use, says Caldwell.
In short, “it’s time to abandon BI — at least as we currently know it.”
Pre-seed round funding is under scrutiny: Is VC pandemic posturing here to stay?
Image Credits: nadia_bormotova / Getty Images
Amid the pandemic, investors became laser-focused on sections of the pitch deck that address monetization and business viability — signs that founders need to come to the table with better-defined businesses in order to succeed.
Investors’ heightened expectations for monetization potential and a company’s positioning within its competitive landscape are unlikely to lessen in the years to come, even in a post-COVID economy.
Clubhouse UX teardown: A closer look at homepage curation, follow hooks and other features
Image Credits: Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Clubhouse’s hockey-stick growth is something most startups would kill for.
However, it also means that UX problems can only be addressed while in “full flight” — and that changes to the user experience will be felt at scale rather under the cover of a small, loyal and (usually) forgiving user base.
Our favorite companies from Y Combinator’s W21 Demo Day
We’re not investors, so we’re not pretending to sort the unicorns from the goats.
But TechCrunch reporters spend a lot of time talking with startups, hearing pitches and telling their stories; if you’re curious about which companies stood out from Y Combinator’s W21 Demo Day, read on.
A look at 4 IPO updates and 2 late-stage funding rounds
Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)
There’s a lot going on: The venture capital market is redlining its engines while public markets remain sympathetic to growing, unprofitable companies.
Let’s round up IPO news from DigitalOcean, Kaltura, Robinhood and Zymergen, and big rounds for Lattice and goPuff.
Dear Sophie: When can I finally come to Silicon Valley?
Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch
Dear Sophie:
I’m a startup founder looking to expand in the U.S. I was originally looking at opening an office in Silicon Valley to be close to software engineers and investors, but then … COVID-19 🙂
A lot has changed over the last year — can I still come?
— Hopeful in Hungary
Staying ahead of the curve on Google’s Core Web Vitals
Image Credits: Aleksei Naumov / Getty Images
Aside from improved SEO, small business websites optimizing for Google’s new Core Web Vitals will reap the rewards of an improved user experience for their site visitors.
While many are looking at the Core Web Vitals as a big hoop to jump through to please the search powers that be, others are seeing — and seizing — the opportunities that come along with this change.
Steady’s Adam Roseman and investor Emmalyn Shaw outline what worked (and what was missing) in the Series A deck
Image Credits: Steady
When it comes to Steady — the platform that helps hourly workers manage and maximize their income and access deals on things like benefits and financial services — the strengths of the business are clear.
But it took time for founder and CEO Adam Roseman to clearly define and communicate each of them in his quest for fundraising.
Discord’s reported $10B exit; Compass and Intermedia Cloud Communications set IPO price ranges
Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)
Alex Wilhelm dug into Discord’s possible $10 billion exit to Microsoft and explored IPO price ranges for real estate tech company Compass and Intermedia Cloud Communications, a unified-communications-as-a-service company.
“It’s a lot,” he noted, “but if we don’t get through it all now, we’ll fall behind and feel silly later.”
Will fading YOLO sentiment impact Robinhood, Coinbase and other trading platforms?
Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)
The consumer trading frenzy could be slowing.
What would happen to Robinhood and its cohorts if the apparent cooling in consumer trading demand continues?
How VC and private equity funds can launch portfolio-acceleration platforms
Image Credits: Miguel Navarro (opens in a new window) / Getty Images (Image has been modified)
Almost every private equity and venture capital investor now advertises that they have a platform to support their portfolio companies, “however, most of us don’t have the budget of an Andreessen Horowitz to support almost every major need” for each startup they’ve bet on, says Versatile VC founder David Teten.
If you’re prioritizing a platform buildout for your firm, consider using the framework he’s outlined.
Automakers, suppliers and startups see growing market for in-vehicle AR/VR applications
Image Credits: Bryce Durbin
Despite all of the pomp and promises about the potential for AR and VR, there isn’t a clear understanding of market demand for bringing the technology to cars, trucks and passenger vans.
Estimates of the global market range from $14 billion by 2027 to as much as $673 billion by 2025, showing just how nascent the market currently is and how much opportunity is present.
Amid pandemic, Middle East adtech startups play essential role in business growth
Image Credits: phototechno / Getty Images
The Middle East is a promising region with growing digital advertising solutions despite locals’ attachment to traditional means of advertising.
In recent years, there has been a shift to the active use of social media and online shopping, meaning the Middle East embodies great potential for adtech startups.
Social+ payments: Why fintechs need social features
Image Credits: Getty Images
Social+ products are seeing mass adoption because they marry community with functionality.
This applies even to fintech companies as taboos around money fall away.
The lightning-fast Series A that was 3 years in the making
Image Credits: Mironov Konstantin / Getty Images
It took Christine Tao, founder of Sounding Board, just over three years to recognize the value of executive coaching and get her company to a Series A.
Here’s how she did it.
NFTs could bridge video games and the fashion industry
Image Credits: Amber J. Dickinson (opens in a new window)
Music companies, celebrities and fashion brands are some of the latest entities to dip a toe into the burgeoning NFT market.
In part two of a three-part series, we take a look at why NFTs are “the next chapter of digital art history.”
Where is the e-commerce app ecosystem headed in 2021?
Image Credits: Charday Penn (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
The pandemic-induced growth of e-commerce is, by now, well documented.
What is happening in the app ecosystem that supports e-commerce? Is it growing, or are we more likely to see consolidations and IPOs?
Let’s explore.
ironSource is going public via a SPAC and its numbers are pretty good
Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)
You’ll want to pay attention to this one: Israel’s ironSource, an app-monetization startup, is going public via a SPAC.
It’s the second SPAC-led debut from an Israeli company in recent weeks worth more than $10 billion, and ironSource is actually a pretty darn interesting company from a financial perspective.
Coursera set to roughly double its private valuation in impending IPO
Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch
The market views Coursera’s edtech business warmly ahead of its impending public offering.
Coursera is being valued as a software company, likely a breathe-easy moment for still-private edtech companies, since the debut could be an industry bellwether.
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Avenue 8 raises $4M to rebuild the traditional real estate brokerage model
We’ve seen a big wave of proptech startups emerge to reimagine how houses are bought and sold, with some tapping into the opportunity with distressed property, and others exploring the “iBuyer” model where houses are bought and fixed up by a single startup and resold to homeowners who don’t want to invest in a fixer-upper. But the vast majority of homes are still sold the traditional way, by way of a real estate agent working via a broker.
Today, a startup is announcing that it has raised seed funding not to disrupt, but improve that basic model with a more flexible approach that can help agents work in a more modern way, and to ultimately scale out the number of people working as agents in the market.
Avenue 8, which describes itself as a “mobile-first residential real estate brokerage” — providing a new set of tools for agents to source, list and sell homes, and handle the other aspects of the process that fall between those — has raised $4 million. This is a seed round, and Avenue 8 plans to use it to expand further in the cities where it is already active — it’s been in beta thus far in the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas — as well as grow to several more.
The funding is notable because of the backers that the startup has attracted early on. It’s being led by Craft Ventures — the firm co-founded by David Sacks and Bill Lee that has amassed a prolific and impressive portfolio of companies — with Zigg Capital and Good Friends (an early-stage fund from the founders of Warby Parker, Harry’s and Allbirds) also participating.
There has been at least $18 billion in funding raised by proptech companies in the last decade, and with that no shortage of efforts to take the lessons of tech — from cloud computing and mobile technology, through to artificial intelligence, data science and innovations in e-commerce — and apply them to the real estate market.
Michael Martin, who co-founded Avenue 8 with Justin Fichelson, believes that this pace of change, in fact, means that one has to continually consider new approaches.
“It’s important to remember that Compass’s growth strategy was to roll out its technology to traditional brokerages,” he said of one of the big juggernauts in the space (which itself has seen its own challenges). “But if you built it today, it would be fundamentally different.”
And he believes that “different” would look not unlike Avenue 8.
The startup is based around a subscription model for a start, rather than a classic 30/70 split on the sales commissions that respectively (and typically) exist between brokers and agents.
Around that basic model, Avenue 8 has built a set of tools that provides agents with an intuitive way to use newer kinds of marketing and analytics tools both to get the word out about their properties across multiple channels; analytics to measure how their efforts are doing, in order to improve future listings; and access to wider market data to help them make more informed decisions on valuations and sales. It also provides a marketplace of people — valets — who can help stage and photograph properties for listing, and Avenue 8 doesn’t require payments to be made to those partners unless a home sells.
It also provides all of this via a mobile platform — key for people in a profession that often has them on the move.
Targeting agents that have in the past relied essentially on using whatever tools the brokers use — which often were simply their own sites plus some aggregating portals — Avenue 8’s pitch is not just better returns but a better process to get there.
“We’ve heard time and time again that agents struggle to identify and leverage the technology and tools to successfully manage their relationships and properties. Changing buyer/seller expectations have accelerated the digital transformation of most agents’ workflows,” said Ryan Orley, partner at Zigg Capital, in a statement. “Avenue 8 is building and integrating the right software and resources for our new reality.”
What’s also interesting about Avenue 8 is how it can open the door to a wider pool of agents in the longer run.
The real estate market has been noticeably resilient throughout the pandemic, with lower interest rates, a generally lower overall home inventory and people spending more time at home (and wanting a better space) creating a high level of demand. With a number of other industries feeling the pinch, a flexible platform like Avenue 8’s creates a way for people — who have taken and passed the certifications needed to become agents — to register and flexibly work as an agent as much or as little as they choose, creating a kind of “Uber for real estate agents,” as it were.
That scaling opportunity is likely one of the reasons why this has potentially caught the eye of investors.
“Avenue 8’s organic growth is clear evidence that the market demands a mobile-first, digital platform,” said Jeff Fluhr, general partner at Craft Ventures, in a statement. “Michael and Justin have a clear vision for modernizing real estate while keeping agents at the center. Avenue 8’s model helps agents take home more even in today’s environment where commissions are compressing.”
Interestingly, just as Uber’s changed the way that on-demand transportation is ordered and delivered, Avenue 8 is starting to see some interesting traction in terms of its place in the real estate market. Although it was originally targeted at agents with the pitch of being like “a better broker” — providing the services brokers are regulated to provide, but with a more modern wrapper around it — it’s also in some cases attracting brokerages, too. Martin said that it’s already working with a few smaller ones, and ultimately might consider ways of providing its tools to larger ones to manage their businesses better.
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Snapdocs raises $60M to manage the mortgage process in the cloud
The U.S. economy may be in a precarious state right now, with a presidential election looming on the horizon and the country still in the grips of the coronavirus pandemic. But partly thanks to lower interest rates, the housing market continues to rise, and today a startup that has built technology to help it run more efficiently is announcing a major growth round of funding.
Snapdocs, which is used by some 130,000 real estate professionals to digitally manage the mortgage process and other paperwork and stages related to buying a home, has raised $60 million in new equity funding on the heels of a few bullish months of business.
In August 2020 — a peak in home sales in the U.S., reaching their highest level in 14 years — the startup saw 170,000 home sales, totaling some $50 million in transactions, closed on its platform. This accounted for almost 15% of all deals done that month in the U.S. Snapdocs is now on track to close 1.5 million deals this year, double its 2019 volume.
On top of this, the startup’s platform is being used by more than 70% of settlement agents nationally, with customers including Bell Bank, LeaderOne Financial Corporation, Googain and Georgia United Credit Union among its customers.
The Series C is being led by YC Continuity (Snapdocs was part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2014 cohort), with existing investors Sequoia Capital, F-Prime Capital and Founders Fund, and new backers Lachy Groom (formerly of Stripe and now a prolific investor) and DocuSign, a strategic backer, also participating.
“Like us they are on a mission to defragment an ecosystem,” King said, referring to it as a “perfect complement” to Snapdocs’ own efforts.
Snapdocs is not talking about its valuation. Aaron King, the founder and CEO, said in an interview that he believes disclosing it is nothing more than “grandstanding” — which is interesting considering that the industry he focuses on, real estate, is all about public disclosures of valuation — but he noted that most of the $103 million that the startup has raised to date is still in the bank, which says something about the company’s overall financial health.
And for some further context, according to PitchBook data estimates, Snapdocs was valued at $200 million in its last round, in October 2019.
Snapdocs’ central premise is that buying a house requires not just a lot of paperwork but also a lot of different parties to be on the same page, so to speak, to set the wheels in motion and get a deal done. There is not just the mortgage (with its multiple parties) to settle; you also have real estate brokers and agents, the home sellers, inspectors and appraisers, the insurance company, the title company and more — some 15 parties in all.
The complexity of all of them working together in a quick and efficient way often means the process of buying and selling a house can be long and costly. And that’s before the pandemic — with the problems associated with social distancing and remote working — hit us.
Snapdocs’ solution has been to build one platform in the cloud that helps to manage the documents needed by all of these different parties, providing access to data and the ability to flag or approve things remotely, to speed the process along. It also has built a number of features, using AI technology and analytics, to also help identify what might be potential issues early on and get them fixed.
King is not your typical tech startup entrepreneur. He began working in mortgages as a notary when he was still in high school — he’s effectively been in the industry for 23 years, he said — and his earliest startup efforts were focused on one aspect of the complexities that he knew first-hand: he saw an opportunity to lean on technology to get notarized signatures sorted out in a legal, orderly and quicker way.
He then got deeper into identifying the possibilities of how tech could be used to improve the larger process, and that is how Snapdocs came into existence.
Given how big the real estate market is — it’s the largest asset class in the world, by many estimates — and how many other industries tech has “disrupted” over the years, it’s interesting that there have been so few attempting to solve it. One of the reasons, it seems, is that there hasn’t been enough of a crossover between tech experts and mortgage experts, and Snapdocs is a testament to the virtues of building a startup specifically around a hard problem that you happen to know really well.
“Most people have identified this as a tech problem, and a lot of the tech — such as e-signatures — has existed for 20 years, but the fragmentation of real estate is the issue,” he said. “We’re talking about a mass constellation of companies and workflow. But we’re obsessed about the workflow of all of these constituents.”
That’s a position that has helped Snapdocs build its standing with the industry, as well as with investors.
“I’ve known the Snapdocs team for many years and have always been amazed by their focus and execution toward bringing each stakeholder in the mortgage process online,” said Anu Hariharan, partner at YC Continuity, in a statement. “In 2013, Snapdocs began as a notary marketplace before expanding horizontally to service title companies and, more recently, lenders. By connecting the numerous parties involved in a mortgage on a single platform, Snapdocs is quickly becoming the “operating system” for mortgage closings. Mortgages, much like commerce, will shift online, bringing improved efficiency and a far better customer experience to the outdated home-closing process.” Hariharan has real estate experience herself and is joining the board with this round.
There have been a number of companies taking new, tech-based approaches to the market to find new and faster ways of doing things, and to open up new kinds of value in the market.
Opendoor, for example, has rethought the whole process of selling and buying houses, taking on a role as a middleman in the process both to take on a lot of the harder work of fixing up a home, and handling all of the difficult stages in the sales process: it’s a role that has recently seen the company catapult to a valuation of $4.8 billion by way of a SPAC-based public listing. An interesting idea, King said, but still only accounting for a small sliver of house sales.
Others, like Orchard, Reonomy and Zumper, have all also raised large rounds on the back of a lot of promise of the market continuing to grow and the opportunity to take part in that process through new approaches. It’s a sign that “safe as houses” still has a place in the market, even with all the other unknowns in play.
“Over the next five years the real estate industry will be completely digitized, so a lot of companies are trying to figure out what their place are, and how to provide value,” King said.
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Property tech startup Habi raises $10M to drive expansion in Latin America
When Brynne McNulty Rojas moved to Bogotá, Colombia four years ago, she encountered a fragmented real estate industry that lacked a central database for consumers to find or compare homes. Rojas was struck by the magnitude of the problem; she was also inspired by the opportunity.
Rojas and business partner Sebastian Noguera homed in on some of the biggest issues in the city’s real estate market, particularly for middle class buyers. They found a market where the average home took 14 months to sell; that figure drops to 10 months for middle class homes. It was a market that lacked price transparency and where sellers used analog tactics like posting a sign in the neighborhood in a futile attempt to attract buyers.
From these problems, Rojas and Noguera founded Habi, a property tech startup with a two-fold approach. The startup founders built a centralized database of residential real estate prices and trends — essentially a multiple listing service — and then used that information to create an automated pricing algorithm to buy and sell homes quickly and efficiently. The company buys, renovates and then sells homes, generating revenue off the margin. It also offers a tool that lets sellers estimate the value of their homes and a database that buyers can use to search for listings. The foundation of its business is its automated pricing technology, which was built using data from its real estate, financial and government partners.
“You can think of it as an MLS plus Opendoor model,” Rojas said in a recent interview. (Opendoor is the U.S.-based property tech startup backed by SoftBank.)
The Bogotá-based startup has now raised $10 million in a Series A round led by Inspired Capital, with participation from 8VC, Clocktower, Homebrew, Vine Ventures and Zigg. The round included angel investments from Flatiron Health and Looker. The company has raised $15.5 million to date.
Habi co-founders Brynne McNulty Rojas and Sebastian Noguera. Rojas is CEO and Noguera is president of the Bogota-based real estate startup. Image Credits: Habi
Since launching in fall 2019, Habi has scaled rapidly — and has even picked up speed during the city’s strict lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic. Transaction volume has increased threefold since March, Rojas noted.
Rojas said its data-driven approach works, allowing the company to sell a home three times faster than the market average.
The company currently covers all of Bogotá. It plans to use this fresh injection of capital to expand to Medellin this month and eventually to other Latin American markets, according to Noguera, who previously ran the digital transformation at Banco de Bogota and co-founded Marqueo.
The founders also intend to eventually expand Habi’s services to become a “one-stop shop for everything related to the home,” Rojas said. In the long term, this might mean connecting consumers with moving, storage, furnishings and other services.
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No pen required: The digital future of real estate closings
Jeanne Casey is a principal on the investment team at MetaProp, where she leads new investments into compelling proptech companies and works closely with portfolio companies on strategic growth initiatives.
On a Wednesday at 4 p.m. in June 2017, I was in a small, packed office in midtown Manhattan.
The overcrowded conference room, with at least five more people than any fire marshal would recommend, was stacked comically high with paperwork and an eclectic collection of cheap pens. As I neared the end of the third hour and the ink of my seventh pen, I realized the mortgage closing process may be somewhat antiquated.
After closing on my first home, it was inconceivable to me that every other expense in my life has gone digital, but the most significant purchase I’ve ever made required hundreds of signatures and several handwritten checks delivered in person. By comparison, I have been able to repay my student loans, comparable in magnitude to a down payment, exclusively through online portals.
How COVID-19 is accelerating digital advancements
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed nearly every facet of our lives. One potential silver lining for the real estate world may be a forced reckoning with the mortgage closing process. Technological advances like e-closings are accelerating this arduous process into the digital age. The U.S. Census Bureau released figures in July citing the rise in homeownership across the country as the pandemic fuels the demand for single-family properties outside of urban areas. This is confirmed by the significant spike in mortgage applications seen in the second quarter of 2020.
The first signs of digitization of the mortgage origination process were seen in mid-2010 when lenders began adopting digital disclosures. Despite the availability of technology, the market has been slower to fully embrace digital closings that enable the full loan package to be electronically reviewed, recorded, signed and notarized. A true e-closing includes a digital promissory note (“eNote”), a virtual closing appointment and the electronic transfer and recording of documents by the county, all of which can be remotely coordinated and executed by the parties involved. The market started to pick up pace in recent years, and we’ve seen the number of e-mortgages increase by more than 450% from 2018 to 2019.
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Mashroom raises £4M for its ‘end-to-end’ lettings and property management service
Mashroom, the London proptech that offers an “end-to-end” lettings and property management service, has raised £4 million in new funding.
Backing comes from existing unnamed private investors and matched funding from the U.K. taxpayer-funded Future Fund. It brings total funding to date for the company to £7 million.
Pitching itself as going “beyond the tenant-finding service” to include the entire rental journey — from property advertising, arranging viewings, credit history checks and maintenance to end of tenancy and dispute resolution — the self-service platform lets landlords list their property, which tenants can then rent easily.
This includes digital credit and reference checks and the signing of rental agreements and tenancy renewals. In addition, open banking is employed to collect rental payments and provide real-time payment information to landlords.
“Letting and renting is, for the most part, still a fragmented, bricks-and-mortar industry,” says Mashroom founder and ex-venture capitalist Stepan Dobrovolskiy. “The experience as a landlord or tenant normally still involves a traditional estate agent who acts as intermediary and charges a hefty fee. While plenty of new players have come along with tech to solve certain points in the experience, we are the first to look at the entire process from end to end.”
Over on Extra Crunch, learn more about the opportunities within property tech with A/O PropTech, the European VC disrupting the €230 trillion real estate industry.
Dobrovolskiy says this sees Mashroom digitise about “98%” of the rental journey, although he maintains that some human interaction is, and perhaps always will be, necessary. “Unlike most traditional agents, we are also still there to help after tenants move in — things like maintenance requests, insuring contents, moving out or extending contracts at the end of the tenancy. We fundamentally believe that automation and tech should augment rather than replace human interactions in this market, and a big part of our brand is to create better relationships between landlords and tenants,” he says.
As an example, Mashroom incentivises tenants to help landlords with viewings at the end of their tenancy by offering a week’s worth of rent as a reward. “No one knows a property better than people who actually live in it, and it removes a lot of friction to have current tenants schedule and host viewings at times that suit them,” explains Dobrovolskiy. “This costs less than 2% of annual rent for landlords, compared to paying 10%+ to an estate agent for finding a new tenant. So we are unlocking financial benefits for landlords and tenants at the same time as giving them more flexibility.”
Mashroom has also developed a “Deposit Replacement Product” as an alternative to the traditional deposit. In partnership with insurer Arch Capital, it lets tenants pay one week’s rent while offering landlords more protection than a regular deposit — up to 12 weeks compared to the typical five weeks.
Noteworthy, the basic Mashroom service is free for tenants and landlords, with the proptech startup generating revenue via its financial products offering, which, along with deposit replacement, includes rent guarantee and other insurance products. The startup also operates its own in-house mortgage brokerage for buy-to-let mortgages and refinancing for landlords.
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