South African student housing startup, DigsConnect.com, has announced the completion of its Pre-Series A seed extension round, having secured an undisclosed multi-million Rand investment from Launch Africa, Goodwater Capital, Five35 Ventures, and Delta Ventures. The monies will be used to promote worldwide expansion, with a focus on assisting African students with housing in the United Kingdom and the United States.
DigsConnect.com, which was launched in 2018, has experienced 300 percent year-over-year growth since university students returned to campus after Covid. The startup currently lists 1,300,000 beds worldwide.
2018 saw global investments in purpose-built student housing surpass $16 billion. This asset class is resilient and continuing increasing rapidly despite the pandemic, as student enrollment continues to skyrocket.
Alexandria Procter, co-founder and CEO of DigsConnect.com, says: “The tech startup industry is experiencing a funding winter at the moment, so the fact that we received so much early support from excellent pan-African and US investors speaks volumes about the strength of the team, the value of our strategic partnership with Student.com, our strategy of early profitability, and sound unit economics.”
DigsConnect.com was founded by then 24-year-old student Procter and co-founder Greg Ramsay-Keal to connect landlords with students seeking housing.
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DigsConnect.com was founded by Procter and Ramsay-Keal while they were both student representative council members at the University of Cape Town, after Procter was overwhelmed with requests to help students locate housing. Recognizing this void in the market, they developed the DigsConnect.com solution to replace the country’s outmoded system.
Charles Rapulu Udoh
Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer, who has several years of experience working in Africa’s burgeoning tech startup industry. He has closed multi-million dollar deals bordering on venture capital, private equity, intellectual property (trademark, patent or design, etc.), mergers and acquisitions, in countries such as in the Delaware, New York, UK, Singapore, British Virgin Islands, South Africa, Nigeria etc. He’s also a corporate governance and cross-border data privacy and tax expert.
As an award-winning writer and researcher, he is passionate about telling the African startup story, and is one of the continent’s pioneers in this regard. You can book a session and speak with him using the link: https://insightsbyexperts.com/view_expert/charles-rapulu-udoh