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Today’s feature of Quick Pitch is an early-stage start up using ML to help match university roommates.
The Market
The student rental market is worth billions every year, and on top of that empty rooms within flats are resulting in hundreds of millions of lost pounds.
This week's business solves these problems by:
Using ML to match students with roommates they are likely to get along with, reducing empty rooms.
Enabling students to sublease their rooms when empty.
One Liner
The mobile app that helps students save up to 50% on rent by matching them with suitable flatmates using a machine learning algorithm.
Quickfire
Headquarters: London, UK
Employee count: 6
Business model: B2B model which earns 4% of the total contract length as commission, but the service is completely free for students.
Investors: Angels and 1 VC (Spitzhorili Invest)
Funding amount: £200k to date (in the process of raising £200k more)
Traction metrics:
1,100 users (60% MoM Growth)
33 DAU
£3.1k MRR (100% MoM Growth for the past 2 months)
Official partnerships with the student unions of King’s College, UCL, City University & LSE.
Partnered with Chestertons & JLL, bringing the total apartment supply to over 30,000.
Due Diligence
APPEALS Strong validation: loby already has a number of very positive reviews written by users who have used (and loved) their product. User-led company: The founders are solving the problem they faced while studying which makes them very well placed to solve this problem. Tech: loby has a competitive advantage in this space by using its own proprietary ML algorithm. | POTENTIAL RISKS Reliance on partnerships: loby makes money B2B, meaning it’s dependent on sourcing and securing relationships with universities and estate agents which generally move slowly. Increasingly crowded market: More and more platforms are popping up hoping to solve this problem, meaning it’ll be harder to get users on to their platform. |
Competition
Founders
Andrey Dobrov - Studied Mathematics at City, University of London
Christian Brown - Studied Theoretical and Mathematical Physics at UCL and
Julio-Cezar Scerbina - Studied Accounting & Finance at King’s College London
Adrian Zabica - CTO, Software developer who studied Computer Science at Swansea
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