This is a story of grit and determination. Based between Italy and Luxembourg, RoomMate has just announced that it has raised a total of €475,000. This seed round combines the investment from Business Angels in Luxembourg and Italy, and the grant from Fit 4 Start.
Photo: RoomMate’s pirate team keeps growing / Credits © RoomMate
The funds will be used to fuel the continuous development and expansion of the two platforms, the Spaces application and the Estelle web platform, aimed at two distinct but united targets: tenants and landlords.
RoomMate was founded in 2017 by Matteo Bucci, Mirko Martignon, Mattia Raffaelli, and Francesco Cotugno. It grew exponentially with its first product on the market, the Spaces application for tenants. This application allowed users to organize their private life from inside and outside their homes. As well as, from the people they live with, being students, young professionals, or even entire families. It had immediate success as it fulfilled and began to resolve a real need in the market by also being built based on collected feedback by the team and from its users (see our article “RoomMate: simplifying the lives of tenants, roommates and landlords“).
In March 2018 the application ranked first at Almacube’s Innovation Day. In May that same year, the acceleration began in the Florentine startup laboratory with Nana Bianca. By September the application was in the top 5 at the international event ‘Go Heroes Meet’ in Maratea, Italy.
RoomMate continued receiving awards in different startup competitions, and in 2019 RoomMate was selected to participate in the international acceleration program, Fit 4 Start, supported by the Luxembourg Government.
Now, in addition to the Spaces application, the Estelle web platform for landlords has been added for the management of medium-long term residential rentals. It is aimed at landlords and property managers, completing the circle between those who live in the accommodation and those who own the properties.
“Landlords need this information to strategically manage and grow their portfolio, and we have designed the insights report to help them make these strategic decisions”.
“With RoomMate the tenant can manage their budget, between the costs of living with others; they can distribute the chores around the house, and make maintenance requests to the landlord,” explains Mattia Raffaelli, CEO of RoomMate. “The rent can also be paid, and all the necessary documents can be managed and signed via the application. The actions related to the landlord are reflected directly on the landlord’s Estelle web platform, greatly reducing the administrative burden of managing a real estate portfolio, as many paper processes have been digitized.”
“More important than saving landlords time and money the Estelle platform allows landlords to gain real insights into the performance of their real estate portfolio,” continues Raffaelli. “Landlords need this information to strategically manage and grow their portfolio, and we have designed the insights report to help them make these strategic decisions. This is already making the lives of our landlord and property management clients a lot simpler.”
“There is a funny story behind how we chose “Estelle” as the name for our platform for landlords. It happened during the last Fit 4 Start steering committee, when we had almost finished developing the first prototype of our rental management platform,” tells RoomMate’s CEO. “We had done everything except deciding on the name for what we had created. Our landlord at the time, who happened to be under a lot of stress because of managing several apartments on her own, had sent us a particularly aggressive email. It was funny that we were working on solving all of the issues that she was facing, so as an homage to her, we gave our platform her first name, because she really fit our buyer persona.”
The RoomMate Spaces app has over 20000 active users already. Countries all over Europe, America, Asia, and Australia, and over 2,500 apartments are already being managed through the RoomMate Estelle’s web platform. These numbers continue to grow on a daily basis.
The team is growing as well and they are always looking for amazing talent, both on the commercial side and the technical development side. “We would like to publicly thank all of those who have believed in them from the start and are looking forward to the very bright future that this investment round announces,” concludes Mattia Raffaelli.
