Property Accounting Startup Proper Raises $4.8M

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Property accounting startup Proper has raised $4.8 in a rolling seed round led by MetaProp, Commercial Observer has learned. 

The San Francisco-based Proper uses its own proprietary software to provide accounting services to multifamily landlords. The services are targeted at landlords with anywhere from 200 to 10,000 units, founder and CEO Mark Rojas told CO, but the sweet spot is between 500 and 2,000 units. 

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The funds will be used to further develop Proper’s software, which uses machine learning to automate and simplify many repetitive accounting tasks. 

Rojas, whose background is in product management and tech, said he started Proper after his own experience renting out his San Francisco apartment while traveling. Just a few days after he left, a pipe burst in the apartment, and resolving the issue led to an avalanche of invoices, communication and follow-ups. 

That, along with several other experiences in property management, led him to realize that one of the biggest pain points for landlords was accounting. And thus Proper was born. 

One issue that makes property accounting difficult is that every building is its own business, with its own ledger and bank accounts, leading to an extremely high volume of invoices. To manage that, Proper automated much of the process of inputting invoices, reducing a task that took six minutes on average per invoice to just one minute, Rojas said. 

In addition to the proptech-focused venture firm MetaProp, investors in the round included Expa, a firm founded by Uber co-founder Garrett Camp, and Ben Ling’s Bling.