Written by Shiv Patel
Fuel Ventures are delighted to announce that we have led a £1m seed round into Hammock, a U.K. fintech/proptech company that is helping landlords and property managers gain better oversight on the financial health of their rental properties.
Hammock has on-boarded more than 1,700 managed properties onto its platform over the last 12 months, tracking over £7 million in rent.
Hammock customers span professional landlords with large portfolios (50+ properties) as well as smaller scale landlords (1 or 2 properties). From a B2B perspective, Hammock also has letting agents and property managers and works with accountants who act as a customer acquisition funnel by recommending the service to their landlord clients.
Hammock CEO and Founder Manoj Varsani: “At a practical level, we want to save landlords time and money. As a landlord, I know too well how time-consuming and inefficient it is to manage your properties with spreadsheets, paper notes and to collate data from multiple bank accounts. As a fintech expert, I realised that landlords and letting agents often rely on archaic technology and haven’t experienced the benefits of new generation tech solutions”.
“Landlords who use Hammock get real-time notifications about all income and expenses, so rent collection and cash flow management are easier to keep an eye on,” says Varsani. “They also get the tools they need to reconcile transactions as they happen, so they always know where they stand in terms of profit and loss. This means that compiling their tax statement goes from taking hours to taking minutes. Landlords can already get our functionalities if they connect their bank accounts via open banking. In September we’ll launch our own current account, so all functionalities will be natively integrated and the whole experience will be even more seamless”.
Fuel Ventures GP, Mark Pearson: "We're very bullish about the impact of open banking on bringing value to consumers through their account data, and Hammock is a great example of this happening for landlords, who now more than ever need to be able to track the performance of their property portfolios. In our initial discussions, we were incredibly impressed by Hammocks' early product and the progress they had made with the funding they had. We're incredibly excited to be part of this latest round of investment, giving Hammock the Fuel to bring real value to the UK's 2.5m landlords."
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About Fuel Ventures:
- Fuel Ventures is a leading early-stage technology investor, investing in fast-growth UK and European businesses that have the potential to return between 10x and 100x.
- Entrepreneurial driven fund led by multi-exit entrepreneurs with £200m+ in exits.
- An advisory committee with over 50+ years’ experience, and exits totalling £2b+
- We now have 35 portfolio companies and after only 4 years our first fund has a 7.4X valuation uplift, validated by third-party follow-on investors.
- We screen 3500+ companies a year using our thorough due diligence processes internally, cherry picking the best 10 companies that have the potential to achieve 100x returns
- We put a director on the Board of every company we invest in and take an active and hands-on role in the management and development of each company, plus bring added extra value through our network of sector experts.
- We invest in commercially scalable technology companies, with operating gross margins between 30% - 90%
- Targeting a minimum of 10x return on investments over a 5-7 year horizon.
- Generous HMRC EIS tax benefits including 30% income tax relief, 0% capital gains tax on exit, loss relief, and inheritance tax relief for UK taxpayers.
- We invest in every fund ourselves, with a large 10% personal investment alongside our investors, this is £2,000,000 - £3,000,000 into every fund!
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