Deal #9 for Axeleo Proptech 1! We’re pleased to announce our participation as lead investors to the €2M Seed round of Paris-based proptech Monga, the new venture launched by industry experts Avidan Koubi and Kevin Valensi, alongside top-notch business angels including Pauline Duval, General Manager of Duval Group. 

Monga bets on tech to streamline the most painful workflow of any RE professionals: repairs management.

70%. That's roughly the share of work time spent by property managers processing technical requests related to their managed units, from simple maintenance issues (plumbing, heating, insulation, etc.) to more complex structural work. This can represent 150+ daily incoming calls and requests per property manager… And often yields poor results: tenants dissatisfied with the deadlines, no-shows by craftsmen on the agreed date, poor quality repairs, budget overruns, etc.

So why is property maintenance so tricky? Because the workflow needed to answer even the simplest technical request is complex. It involves different parties (tenants who detect/face the problem, property managers who coordinate things, craftsmen who manage the repairs...) with various interests at stake (PMs want to control their costs, tenants want the repairs to be done in a timely manner, craftsmen need to optimize their working schedule…) and very little information available (over the type of damage, the degree of urgency, the quality of the chosen craftsman...). 

This is precisely where tech - and Monga - can come into play. The startup has developed a SaaS tool designed to digitize this technical request management workflow by involving all stakeholders on the same platform: 

- A dashboard for the real estate professional (property manager, condo manager, private lessors, family office, institutional investors…) centralizing and filtering all requests ; 

- A tenant-facing app, enabling them to easily launch a new request and to follow it in real time ; 

- An app for craftsmen, allowing them to manage all their assigned orders. 

Beyond the instant productivity gain for users - with a time spent on requests that can be divided by 20, Monga's goal is also to generate quality data about requests. In the long-run, this data will be key to optimize processes and drastically facilitate the work of property managers : identifying instantly the right craftsmen, matching each type of request to the most appropriate response, prioritizing processes based on the type of damage, etc.

With this unique positioning, Monga plans to tap into the deep and yet under-digitized market of property maintenance. 

In France, there are roughly 20M residential units managed by real estate professionals, and more than 70M sqm of space owned by businesses (and therefore managed/maintained by dedicated property & facility managers). But this deep market is only addressed by a highly fragmented and poorly digitized service offer on repairs: there are over 1M craftsmen and 400k construction companies in the French building sector alone, with highly different scopes of expertise and intervention. The opportunity behind the coordination and structuring of this ecosystem through tech platforms is enormous. That's the opportunity Monga is looking for.

This market already features several existing players, often not very digitized, and some new entrants. But Monga’s approach - and its people - make it stand out of the crowd. Rather than a contracting/construction company, Monga is primarily a technology company. This pure SaaS positioning - as Monga does not perform the work itself, but rather finds the best people to do it - is a strong advantage to be able to sell the tool beyond the first historical clients, and to shape a truly data-driven property maintenance workflow. Thanks to this “tech-first” approach, Monga can position itself on all types of works, from plumbing to structural work, which makes it easier to upsell to customers, and to scale within the same customer portfolio on different use cases. 

And of course, there is the team. With the combined experience of its two founders, Monga already has a network of high-quality craftsmen to bring to the platform - more than 3500 to date, and a thorough knowledge of the real estate industry. Avidan, its CEO, comes with a strong background in real estate investment, and has worked with a number of craftsmen on large projects. Kevin, the COO, was previously Head of Sales for another startup in the building maintenance space.

Monga's grand challenges: build a team, enhance its product

With this €2M round of financing, Monga's founding team sets itself three objectives: 

- Structure a product & tech team to increase stickiness and usage with existing clients and extend the offering to other real estate professionals ; 

- Speed up the company's commercial development by increasing its business volume - starting from 200+ clients and 7 million euros in 2022 ; 

- Roll out the solution internationally with some first use cases in neighbouring countries. 

… And to achieve this, Monga is looking for 20 top talents in Sales, Tech and Marketing to join its team and help reinvent how we manage properties!

Axeleo Capital is delighted to support Avidan and Kevin in the next step of their journey to make property management more efficient and enhance technical maintenance in the real estate asset class. Congrats once again to the whole team and looking forward to what’s next!