💡Founder Spotlight: Leo & Housematch

In this blog series, we turn a spotlight on the ambitious, talented founders that are emerging from the Embarc community – and the exciting start-ups they’re building.

Leo – one of our earliest members – has taken the plunge and launched his start-up, Housematch

If you’re tired of spending hours searching for flats on Rightmove & Zoopla, Housematch is for you.

We asked Leo some questions about Housematch & the story of how it came to be – check out his answers below 👇

What's Housematch all about?

Housematch makes it easy to find a place to live in London from your phone. We present info that Rightmove doesn’t have, like distance to a supermarket or a tube station, and we do it in a way that’s really lovely to use from your phone. (We’ve also got AI house summaries that cut out the marketing fluff, plus more!) And yes, you can call estate agents directly from the app.

What’s the problem that Housematch is solving?

Renting in London sucks. Our aim is fix the experience from the search to getting your deposit back. Right now we’re focusing on making it easy to find a place in the first place. That means better filters, more nuance, AI-powered semantic search, and learning what you’ll like. Longer-term, we want to give tenants more power during their tenancy as well.

What’s your founding story - how did you get here?

Housematch was built by me and my friend Raymond. The last innovation in the housing market came over two decades ago (Rightmove was founded in 2000!), and we thought it was odd that there wasn’t a truly mobile-native way to find a place to live. One of our early users said “it makes a painful process feel pleasurable.” Now we’ve got to create that emotion for a million more people!

How can the Embarc community help you?

Try out the app at usehousematch.com! If you like it, share it with a friend, and if you don’t, let me know why! A full 25% of visits to Housematch came from people sharing this month — word of mouth make a huge difference.

How can you help the Embarc community?

Raising, selling, and AI. I’ve been at my current start-up for almost two years, and have learnt a lot about raising money and B2B sales. Ray has made lots of contributions to the AI frontier as a researcher.