Cozy, a property management platform for those who happen to be landlords in addition to having other careers, has raised $5 million in a Series A investment round.
The San Francisco-based startup launched in June as a rent payment and tenant screening platform and is now helping approximately 2,000 small-time landlords in 500 U.S. cities manage the payments and tenant paperwork for their properties, said Cozy’s CEO and co-founder, Gino Zahnd.
General Catalyst Partners, with participation from The Social+Capital Partnership, led the funding round for Cozy. Neil Sequeira, managing director at General Catalyst Partners, has joined Cozy’s board of directors.
“The Cozy team has built a unique ‘software as a service’ platform that saves landlords and tenants money, time and headaches,” Sequeira said in a statement. “We invested in Cozy because we believe their platform is well positioned to continue its remarkable growth of adoption within a massive market opportunity.”
The startup, which raised $1.5 million in a seed round that included the backing of angel investors Gary Vaynerchuk and Tim Ferriss, recently processed the millionth dollar for its landlord clients who pay $9 per rental unit per month to access the platform, Zahnd said.
Cozy claims to have had zero churn among its clients and notes that single-family homes make up 75 percent of the units being managed on its platform.
The firm will use the funds to start marketing its product, which to date has been all word of mouth, and grow its design and engineering teams.
“Now it’s time to pour gasoline on this thing and grow it into a behemoth,” Zahnd said.
The 14-employee firm is planning to release a credit reporting feature in the coming months, he said, and mobile Web and native apps by the end of the year.
A similar property management service for smaller-time landlords, from the Vancouver-based firm Pendo Rent, launched earlier this month.
Zahnd says he’s not concerned about the competition from the north at the moment because there’s so much white space in their market at the moment, but he anticipates there might be some when the firm begins focusing on Canada at some point.
