Start-up that helps students find a place to rent scores funding

HostelHunting received $500,000 in seed funding led by KK Fund, with Incubate Fund and Cradle Fund participating, reports Tech in Asia

Renting an apartment in college can be tough. Demand gets so high before the opening of each semester and if you didn’t start your hunting early on, you’d have no choice but to settle with an inconvenient location.

Malaysian friends Wen Khai, Joey Lim, and Marcus Low experienced this conundrum when they were students so they decided to foray into the hostel business after graduation. But soon they realised that providing and managing accommodation was not enough. It’s not just the supply of apartments that’s a problem, but the search process, which is time-consuming and impractical.
 

So Khai, Joey, and Marcus teamed up with Loke Weng Leong, who owns a digital agency and development house, and built HostelHunting.
 

HostelHunting is a site that helps students search for accommodation within or near university campuses. Students can filter the listings by area or institution. Detailed photos and descriptions are provided for each listing. All properties are verified and bookings come with a 100% refund guarantee. To facilitate the booking process, HostelHunting allows students and landlords to communicate with each other through a messaging feature. The company takes a service fee for every successful booking.
 

From just 600 property listings in a single student area upon its launch in January, the platform now has over 21,000 in its inventory in most student towns in Malaysia. It also launched in Singapore this month.
 

Today, HostelHunting announced it is ready to further expand with a $500,000 seed funding round led by KK Fund, with Incubate Fund and Cradle Fund participating. 

This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here.