Baselane, an end-to-end banking and finance management platform for individual landlords and real estate investors, announced launching its fully integrated banking platform, according to a press release shared with FinLedger.
The platform operates alongside partner Blue Ridge Bank N.A., and will allow landlords to open and manage banking accounts tailored to specific needs of their investment properties. Baselane says a list of functions available in the product includes:
- Multiple banking accounts on one platform, with custom accounts to keep expenses organized and funds separated.
- Smart debit cards that enable landlords to control and manage expenses.
- Free, with no hidden fees on cash withdrawals or transfers. High-yields (4x the national average) on all deposits.
- Unlimited 1% cashback on all spending with Baselane Debit Card.
- Integration with financial tools for landlords and real estate investors.
The company, which was founded in 2020 by Jad Yaghi, Mathias Korder and Thorben Scheidegger, recently raised a $7.9 million seed funding round in November. The round included participation from Activant Capital, Collaborative Fund, Conversion Capital, Digram Ventures and Thomvest Ventures.
Korder and Scheidegger told FinLedger that, after leaving Boston Consulting Group, they joined venture capital fund Diagram Ventures as entrepreneur residents, where they met CTO Jad Yaghi.
“We said we were very excited about this idea and they gave us some capital to go test. Through a landing page with no product built, just the waitlist, and within four weeks I think we had like 3000 landlords that had signed up. It was very evident that there was huge demand for an all-in-one banking platform,” Korder said.
Baselane’s chief goal is to solve the pain points that landlords face when it comes to dealing with finances and managing their businesses. Scheidegger says there are three key aspects there, which include: collecting, managing and reconciling payments, insight into their property finances and investment health, and insuring properties.
“If you go and speak with any landlord and ask them, ‘How do you run your finances?’ The answer is most commonly that they’re basically going and stitching together five or six different tools to make everything work. Most landlords are still collecting rent manually, either by cash or check,” Scheidegger told FinLedger.
“Then you have the rent coming in, and they’re recording the incoming rent payments manually in an Excel sheet somewhere. They have all of these expenses that they have to manage as well, whether that’s for repairs or maintenance or property management. They’re going and recording all of those expenses again manually in an Excel sheet,” he added.
In order to handle investment health and give landlords insight into property finances, Baselane also offers KPIs and other metrics in an easy-to-view dashboard. When it comes to insurance, the founders say that they lean on a self-built marketplace to give landlords access to automated and firm quotes from partner insurers.
Korder noted that the company has been careful while in beta not to spend much on acquisition, due to a significant amount of organic traffic, but says looking ahead Baselane plans to put dollars behind acquisitions and start scaling the business.
“As you build technology it’s about speed, and so we’ve been very quick to get the product out. From there, it’s really starting to develop sophistication in the product. That’s what we’re excited about, a lot of automation of data insights that we can provide. That’s the key piece,” Korder said.
In other recent proptech news, Snappt raised a $100 million Series A to help landlords combat fraud in rental application documents. Ocrolus also announced a new integration within the ICE Mortgage Technology‘s Encompass platform.