Suyo Tackles Informal Housing in Colombia with Follow-on Funding from Omidyar Network
Summary
Suyo, a startup making it easier and more affordable for low-income families in Colombia to formalize their houses and land, recently received follow-on financing from Omidyar Network. In addition to these investors, we have received investment capital, grant funding, and/or prize money from Harvard Innovation Lab, four Latin American angel investors, Echoing Green, Ruta N, Agora Partnerships, and Habitat for Humanity.LAVCA: What inspired you to tackle the informal housing problem in Colombia?Matt Alexander: The inspiration for Suyo stems from my experiences working with low-income families in Latin America over the previous decade. The pilots results encouraged us to fully develop a business model for scaling technology-enabled property formalization.LAVCA: Can you share insights into the problem Suyo is tackling that could help investors outside of Colombia understand the opportunity?Matt Alexander: Before Suyo, low-income families in Colombia had two options for formalizing their property: either they waited for a subsidized government or non-profit organization project to come along, or they hired independent professionals and informal middlemen.Property rights formalization services have been severely insufficient and unsustainable under public and social sector-led programs. Provider costs are inflated because of inefficient, manual systems for property data collection, the involvement of excessive intermediaries, and limited scale in customer acquisition. With an unrelenting focus on scale, we have designed a model with minimal infrastructure and personnel requirements, and a flexible technology solution for addressing the variation between different geographies.