SOUTH AFRICA – DigsConnect.com, a student housing startup, has announced the completion of its Pre-Series A seed extension round to promote worldwide expansion, with a focus on assisting African students with housing in the United Kingdom and the United States.
The undisclosed multi-million Rand investment was from Launch Africa, Goodwater Capital, Five35 Ventures, and Delta Ventures.
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 a US$16 billion. This asset class is resilient and continuing increasing rapidly despite the pandemic, as student enrollment continues to skyrocket.
“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,” Alexandria Procter, co-founder and CEO of DigsConnect.com, said.
DigsConnect.com was founded by then 24-year-old student Procter and co-founder Greg Ramsay-Keal to connect landlords with students seeking housing.
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.
The startup, which raised ZAR12 million (US$830,000) in March 2019 and last year secured a ZAR3 million (US$200,000) grant from the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, recently entered into an agreement with the world’s largest student accommodation site, Student.com, enabling it to expand its presence to approximately 30 new countries and 400 new cities.
It now has over 1.3 million beds listed on its platform, and is expanding its operations into the UK, US, Singapore, and Europe.
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