Our Journey to $1bn with Property Finder 🎥

How do great companies get built? It takes strong leadership, time, patience, and a lot of hard work from a lot of people and stakeholders. And of course, a little sprinkle of luck.

We met Michael Lahyani (Mika to his friends) and his co-founder Renan Bourdeau 12 years ago in April 2012. We initially invested in early 2013 and followed on a few years later. Together, we travelled the world recruiting, fundraising, building bridges, learning, buying companies, launching new markets, and everything in between. We had an incredible journey with Mika that we will always look back on fondly and with the best memories. By the time we did our follow-on investment, we had such high conviction in what Property Finder was building, I even committed to Mika’s father that Property Finder would be a billion-dollar company and that BECO would be there as the wind in its sails. We’re delighted to have delivered on that commitment, Uncle Max!

No great leader does it on their own, Mika has built a world-class leadership team to drive an undeniable value proposition. The value proposition of Property Finder was so strong to its customers at inception, which was one of the eureka moments we had when we got to know about Property Finder, and the leadership team constantly innovates and obsesses over increasing that value year after year.

And, of course, the sprinkle of luck in this story is that the region experienced a boom in the Real Estate sector, led primarily by the UAE, so much so that the company grew exponentially with the now $300+ billion sector.

We recently exited our investment in Property Finder, with the company buying our shares. This marks our second $1B+ exit after Careem, and we have more in the stable, such as Kitopi amongst others. As venture investors, we have to return capital to our limited partners and sunset the fund. Otherwise, we would have loved to remain investors for much longer, as they have only just gotten started. It’s still day one for Property Finder, and we will continue to support the company where we can.

Here are some extracts from a fun fireside chat that I had the pleasure of doing with Mika a few weeks ago at our AGM. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

Dany Farha