99.co’s unbiased and thorough property listings have gained a faithful following since the home-grown startup launched late last year. It has since doubled its traffic to about 150,000 visits a month. What’s more, they recently received over $2 million in fresh funding from the likes of Eduardo Saverin (of Facebook fame) and Sequoia Capital. Here, we speak to CEO Darius Cheung about the quirks of the market and why apartment listings are always such a mess.
Tell us the origin story.
I have been renting for over 20 years and I’ve always hated it. The duplicate, fake, false listings are all over the market place. The existing property listings system creates a situation where you pay more to win. Only those who can pay a higher price get more leads. There’s an arms race between agents and business costs get passed down to agents and consumers. Only the portals are really benefiting. Agents do not have incentives to do complete, quality listings, and this harms consumer experience. We thought we could do better.
How did you manage to land funding from Eduardo Saverin and Sequoia Capital?
I was introduced to them by a common friend. While fund raising is not easy, we don’t really spend time on it. We believe in spending most of the time working on the product.
What do you plan to do with this fresh injection of funds?
We are completely focused on Singapore market at this point. The new funding allows us to build the best product we can for both agents and consumers and scale up the supply and demand on our platform.
Do you feel like this sort of massive funding can be a double-edged sword?
Could be sometimes, as expectations are set very high. But in our case we have the ambition to match so we are pretty comfortable with it.
What’s your work set up like?
We are a team of 20 people, working from the famous startup hub Block 71. Like many startups, we work in an open office with no hierarchy or bureaucracy. We are all friends and have lots of fun together too.
