Whose Your Landlord (WYL), a Nigerian-owned housing startup based in the US recently announced raising $2.1 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Black Operator Ventures, better known as BlackOps Ventures.
Last year December, the venture capitalist firm, BlackOps Ventures pooled $13 million in capital from investors with the intention of investing in Black Founders. This WYL funding round is proof that the fund is living up to its intention.
Why the name “Whose Your Landlord,” and What is it about?
Whose Your Landlord, also known as WYL was founded back in 2015 by Ofo Ezeugwu — a Nigerian based in Buffalo, US — **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.
To simply put, WYL collects renter feedback, which is easy to find and digest on its website. For rental owners with a good number of units, they can pay for the collected information, allowing landlords to track how they are performing with their customers, how many of their current tenants intend to stay, and so forth.
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The startup writes on its website that it uses the possessive form of the word ‘who’ because — “We’re giving our community ownership of their living situations by putting housing in their hands.” WYL intend to build the world’s most trusted rental community by bringing transparency, equity, and humanity to the everyday interactions between residents and home providers.
“What we’ve learned about ourselves is we’re selling a process and an approach, not just a platform,” CEO and founder WYL, Ezeugwu said. “We emphasize a feedback-based culture which provides documentation and insights on how you can improve.”
Whose Your Landlord 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. Before it launched its software product, WYL generated revenue through brand partnerships with companies like Allstate and others that sell to folks who rent.
Investing in Black Founders — WYL $2.1 million funding intent by BlackOps Ventures
The BlackOps Ventures team — James Norman, Heather Hiles, Sean Green, and Ebony Peay Ramirez saw that even though Black founders are raising more capital in the past year, it is just a fraction of fraction compared to what other white founders coming out from a handful of US schools have managed in the recent years. So, the venture capital firm wants to shake up the norm and invest in Black founders as its focus.
According to Norman, BlackOps is looking to invest in black founders as they are underinvested in, and who are the biggest arbitrage in tech.
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With this funding, Whose Your Landlord is looking to expand and increase the quality of its features, by introducing new innovations like using NLPs to find trends in written reviews, to help companies with hundreds of units to better parse incoming feedback which in turn would naturally increase the quality of the service it.
Since running pilots for its SaaS offering last year, WYL has onboarded 7,000 house units and has earlier raised $1.1 million over a roughly seven-year period, the CEO said.
