• Greek-founded proptech startup Flyway raised $10M in seed and debt funding.
• Signal Ventures, Monday Capital, and GroupRMC participated in the round, together with many notable angel investors from the proptech space such as Florian Hagenbuch and Alex Chatzieleftheriou.
• With the new money, Flyway will acquire and sell its first properties in London
Founded by serial entrepreneurs Nikos Drandakis and Sanja Ilic, Flyway offers fully managed second home co-ownership. Drandakis previously founded Beat, a ride-hailing app that Daimler acquired, having reached $700 million in annual revenue.
Proceeds from the funding round will be used to acquire and sell Flyway’s first properties in London.
“This raise will help us make the first critical step toward our vision to democratize access to second homes in cities all over the world. We believe there is a tremendous opportunity to help people live in different cities while retaining the value of their investment and, at the same time, get access to a lifestyle that only the ultra-wealthy people had so far,” Flyway’s CEO Nikos Drandakis tells The Recursive.
Based in London and Athens, Flyway targets the international second homes market in large cities, known as pied-à-terre. The startup offers the best way to buy and own a second home in central city hotspots, and it modernizes the generations-old practice of co-owning a second home, creating a marketplace that makes buying and selling of shares easy.
“Our top priority is to offer an unparalleled experience to the first customers that will buy shares in our homes, such that will create the basis for word-of-mouth dynamics and customer testimonials. In parallel, we are further building our operations machine that provides our customers with a seamless experience from the sale to the stay in their Flyway home,” Drandakis adds.
Flyway’s solution also includes adding professional management of the property and technology to make owning and staying in the home seamless and straightforward for all co-owners.
Flyway’s solution can help with solving the housing crisis
Buyers considering a second home in a city can search for available listings and discover the best opportunities based on their preferred location, home type, and budget.
The buyer then purchases their desired share of the property, for example, a quarter of the house, which guarantees them access to the home for a quarter of the year, and Flyway keeps selling the remaining shares of the property to vetted buyers.
Once they buy their share, owners can use Flyway’s mobile app to schedule stays quickly and equitably and have full transparency over their second home’s expenses. Buyers can then pay a monthly fee to Flyway to cater for all property management, including arranging maintenance, repairs, upgrades and cleaning and enhancing the technology that powers up the model.
According to Drandakis, Flyway’s business model can also be an important contributor to solving the housing crisis because its mission is to fully utilize previously underutilized real estate assets.
“Currently, in cities like London, you can see whole neighborhoods stay in the dark for periods because most of their homes are owned by second home owners who visit them only 10% or 20% of the time. With our managed co-ownership platform, these second homes will be fully utilized and at the same time they will contribute to the local economy throughout the year,” he tells The Recursive.
In addition to Drandakis and Ilic, Flyway’s team includes Leonidas Dakopoulos, with experience in Finance in the shipping industry; George Papadopoulos, long-time Engineering partner of Drandkakis since Beat; Emma Gavala, with a successful career in Product Marketing; and Anton Remnev, formerly Director of Product and tech at Sberbank.
