Latin American Rentals Specialist Aptuno Raises $5 Million Seed Round

The Colombian PrpTech startup Aptuno has announced a seed funding round of $5 million to continue its mission to simplify renting in Latin America.

In addition to Dalus Capital and Kayyak Ventures, investors in the seed round include Amador Holdings, Salkantay Ventures, Shaun di Gregorio, CEO and founder of Frontier Digital Ventures, Tomás Uribe, Rodrigo Sanchez-Rios, and Jerónimo Uribe, the founders and CEO of fellow Colombian PropTech company La Haus; Michael Lahyani, CEO of PropertyFinder as well as U.S.-based backers FJ Labs, SOMA Capital, and Jonathan Wasserstrum, CEO of leading commercial leasing platform SquareFoot. Aptuno also counts VivaReal founder Brian Requarth as a co-founder and investor.

“With this capital, Aptuno will scale our fintech product line and machine learning capabilities to further tap the true market potential of rental properties in key markets across Latin America,” said Alejandro Gómez de Greiff, co-founder and co-CEO of Aptuno.

Founded in Bogota in late 2019 Aptuno is looking to update how house hunters rent property in the region with its end-to-end solution. Broadly similar in its model to runaway Brazilian success story Quinto Andar, Aptuno uses technology to verify listings, pre-qualify prospective tenants, deal with paperwork and process transactions.

“Aptuno is building an end-to-end solution to make the rental process more efficient for tenants, landlords and brokerages alike,” said Cristina Palacios, co-founder and COO of aptuno. “The addressable market for aptuno is only growing, and we intend to grow with it. We’re thrilled to have our investors’ support as we build the technology needed to make renting properties in Latin America more accessible.”

Aptuno is one of several new companies to have sprung up in Latin America over recent years that use FinTech to add liquidity and trust to cumbersome systems that suffer from a lack of trust. The opportunity in the market is significant according to de Greiff:

“There are over 25 million households for rent in Spanish-speaking Latin America, mostly in the hands of individual landlords, yet renting remains a very cumbersome process for renters, owners and brokers. By simplifying the process with fast credit approvals for rent guarantee insurance, rent discount loans, a 100 percent digital transaction and tech enabled property management services, our technology provides liquidity to the massive but historically inefficient single-family rentals market”

The company already claims to be the largest platform for rental listings in the three Colombian cities it operates in and closes an average of over 100 deals per month. The latest funding round comes three months on from the company's expansion to Mexico City with further geographical expansion likely on the cards in the not too distant future.