Whose Your Landlord Raises $2.1M For Its Rental Review And Data Service
02/01/22, 7:13 PM
Money raised
$2.1 million
Industry
financial services
software
Round Type
seed
Whose Your Landlord,1 or WYL, announced a $2.1 million seed round today led by Black Operator Ventures, better known as BlackOps Ventures. TechCrunch readers will already be aware of BlackOps’ fund, which we covered at launch last December. The goal behind the $13 million capital pool was to invest in Black founders. The WYL round indicates that the fund is living up to its plan.
Company Info
Additional Info
Launched with a focus on collecting renter notes concerning landlord and building quality, the company has evolved to include a SaaS service for what WYL calls “home providers,” or the folks who own buildings and other rental units. The startup charges building owners $2 per unit, per month for its software, a figure that Ezeugwu said can be discounted for larger contract volumes. The startup has plans to expand its feature set, naturally, allowing it to charge more in time. Presumably, the company can continue that work to supplement its software incomes, though we anticipate that WYL will become a majority software business in time — if it isn’t already — from a revenue perspective. In Norman’s view, Black founders are underinvested in, which means that his firm may have access to deal flow that competing venture firms are overlooking and that the founders he wanted to invest in are “the biggest arbitrage opportunity to tech.”Now flush with its largest investment to date and a software product in-market — after running pilots for the SaaS offering last year, WYL has onboarded 7,000 units, the CEO said — the startup intends to hire and keep building. If that goes according to plan, it shouldn’t have to wait another seven years for external investor interest to manifest in the form of a seven-figure check.The startup uses the “possessive form of the word ‘who’,” it writes on its website, because it wants its “community [to have] ownership of their living situations by putting housing in their hands.