Viva

Renters (in America today) face a 40X wealth disparity compared to homeowners. And renters are a majority of America’s BIPOC, low-income, LGBTQ+, and Single Mom households.

So the "renter wealth equity gap" is really an economic, gender, and income equity gap.

And the wealth equity gap begets a gap in access to resources for health, education, and thus housing is a key driver of the social determinants of health.

Consider the irony that 44m Americans rent each year, and put a collective $1T+ into rent payment, but historically do not recoup $1 for that collective 'investment.'  

And more households are rent burdened, putting more than 30% of their paycheck to rent.  In fact, 1 in 4 rental households spend 70% of their paycheck on rent + utilities.

Additionally, ESG funds, which include investments in real estate, promise to make improvements but to date - per Harvard research - have not been required to prove with verifiable data the impact they claim to achieve.

Enjoy a product demo! (click to access)

• Viva’s FinTech platform helps renters earn cash back from each rent payment, deposited in their Viva account - often $1k per year - to help them save, invest, and achieve their personal goals.
• This is a difference maker for an average American family that today cannot survive a $500 emergency.
• Renters earn cash back when they perform positive behaviors that create value for their landlord, a model that is already established in auto-insurance, where "safe drivers save 40% on car insurance."
• Those behaviors can be as simple as: Pay rent on time, get renter's insurance (per your lease requirement), identify safety and emergency equipment in your home - like "water cutoff valves" to stop problems before they spiral out of control - and to notify leasing agents 60 days before your lease ends of your intention to stay or go.
• Additionally, these positive behaviors contribute to a Viva score, that can be used in lieu of biased credit scores to secure future safe, affordable housing.
• We also help our families name their goals - during onboarding they express whether they want to own a home, pursue education, or better health - and we help them track their progress, and coming soon will introduce an "opportunities board" so they can access the right opportunity at the right time based on their goals x qualification criteria.
• Our secret sauce is that Viva helps landlords maximize their profits!
• Our landlords - typically owners of large portfolios of apartments worth billions - use Viva to offer cash rewards to enlist renters to help eliminate inefficiencies: reducing vacancy and wear and tear, and increasing net profits by as much as 9%!
• Rental Real Estate in America today is a more than $8T Market - And our Customers have validated that 9% in improved profits represents $70B per year in savings & $588B in appreciation of the underlying real estate.
• Our landlord CRM helps a real estate asset manager track the performance of their properties - their IRR (rate of return) and NOI - net operating income - as well as the key drivers: Occupancy, Renter Retention, and our Viva Score aggregated to the property level.
• Bonus: 80% of our earliest B2B multifamily partners - who collectively represent $6.4B in assets (32,000 doors) - are leveraging an ESG thesis to drive improvements to the bottom line (Net Operating Income, NOI), but are also benefiting from loan discounts (e.g. Freddie Mac) and other incentives.  In a market where credit is tightening, these 'sweeteners' will become increasingly attractive.
• Why ESG funds need Viva:  Our platform provides automatic reports on verifiable ESG metrics that are increasingly necessary in an awakening regulatory landscape - to raise ESG funds, or qualify for federal loan discounts and other lucrative incentives.

We serve first and foremost America's "missing middle" - the below area median income (AMI) families that include many frontline workers - teachers, nurses, firefighters - who commit their lives to society but often find a fractured social contract that leaves them working harder each year yet still falling behind:  consider what happens when rent increases by 10%+ Y/Y but wages remain flat at 3-4% Y/Y?

This is also described as predominantly "Workforce Housing" - because it is designed to be affordable even without subsidies, though many of our early private sector partners receive some public dollars.

We presently serve 1,000+ families, including: four urban apartment communities in the greater Atlanta, GA metro area, and a rural community in South Texas Rio Grande Valley.

Our communities are diverse, and multi-lingual, and that is why our app is developed from the ground up in native Spanish and English, which is better than a literal translation.  Next up: Portuguese!

We are well-positioned because our team comes from diverse backgrounds, with shared origin stories in rental housing - some of our team members making the transition from unsafe rental housing during their Viva journey - and we have the absolute best early stage customers in the real estate market.

Our #1 customer, Veritas Impact Partners, is a non-profit that helps us contract with property owners/managers but also provides its own team 'on the ground' to help residents solve problems and access resources - like the Viva app.  Their "Resident Engagement Coordinators" work hand in hand with residents, and we work hand in hand with both audiences, to understand why it might be difficult to access opportunities.

As one example, in recent weeks we have been discussing how words like "investment, and banking" create anxiety for residents.  This is leading to weekly updates to our app to better listen to, reach, and respond to our families needs.

In fact, we are formalizing this early 'pilot phase' to our regional launches, so that we spend the first 30-60-90 days with a subset of residents who are compensated (via Viva rewards!) for their time as testers and users of our app experience, to make technology work for them, in their home!

As well, our customers help us create, or create on their own, amazing 'collateral' like this video produced by our customer, introducing Viva to residents in Atlanta. 

We presently serve 1,000+ families, including: four urban apartment communities in the greater Atlanta, GA metro area, and a rural community in South Texas Rio Grande Valley.

We believe that a startup venture, like a child, requires a 'village' to reach its full potential, so we would seek to avail ourselves of every resource.

We have a very talented and experienced startup team, however, because of that, we know not to under-invest in seeking help from those who could de-risk the work ahead, through promotion, connecting us to policy experts, deepening our research validation, shoring up engineering, etc.

Like a Whole Foods buffet, we will focus but browse all offerings before having a great experience with Solve, if allowed.

• Right now for most renters rent is a 100% expense, a loss that draws down from their discretionary dollars
• If rent can be re-characterized as an opportunity to earn cash back, create savings, invest, and pursue goals, it redefines the stark binary between rent (lose) and own (win).
• We believe that within 10 years residents will expect benefits from their rental housing in the same way employees do from their employer today.
• A rental benefit package in the future we are helping effect will include profit-sharing, and pathways to savings and investment.
• The $1T+ that consumers put into rental housing is an investment; it is presently simply not characterized as such.
• The key in our minds is that real innovation must meet market demands to incentivize capital and truly scale - and the good news is, landlords do not need to invest in renters as a form of charity, just as employers do not offer benefits packages to employees as charity.
• Our growing base of data shows real estate asset managers that invest in residents through Viva can increase net profits by 9%!
• Fixing this divide - one way or another - is key to repairing a fractured social contract in America.
• If people work hard, and seek safe housing for their families, they should not feel like they are at risk of falling behind for each additional year of hard work and commitment.
• Our model shows if renters earn up to 8% of their rent in cash back - about $1k per year - and can invest those proceeds in risk-adjusted assets - they can accrue $250k+ in net wealth over 30 years, moving them from from $0 in net wealth to across the projected median wealth in their lifetime.
• This is key to kickstarting a generational wealth journey for our families.

• We intend to grow with out early stage, predominantly ESG customers, primarily real estate asset managers, from 1,000+ families in our network today, to more than 30,000+ by early 2024, to exceed 100,000+ within 2-3 years.
• This scale is not merely a vanity metric, but necessary to evaluate and (hopefully) prove out, or iterate to prove out, our unit economics and behavioral expectations for residents, landlords, and all other stakeholders.
• Instead of a 10-year overnight success, we would love to be a 5-year overnight success that helps ignite a "renter revolution" where consumers demand to be cut in on the profit opportunity of their discretionary dollars committed to rent.
• As well, we intend to broader our ability to serve our families, because what is the point of saving money as a renter if you are pushed into the wrong mortgage product?  We have a partner startup that is a former mortgage originator that has data asserting that 90% of Americans have the wrong mortgage, and are paying tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in excess interest over the (often short) life of their mortgage.
• We think within 5 years we will earn the right to shift from a seed thesis of "helping renters earn cash back, create savings, and invest" to "helping consumers keep as much of their paycheck as possible, and put each of their dollars to best effect, to help them pursue their goals!"
• This will be made possible by focusing on meaningful KPIs:
  • Families in Network
  • Rewards Earned
  • Interest Dollars Earned (Savings and Investment)
  • Goals Set: Homeownership, Healthcare, Education, etc.
  • Progress to Goals
  • Goals Achieved
  • Wellness Index: Wealth and Well-Being of our Families

Meaningful KPIs:

• Families in Network
• Rewards Earned
• Interest Dollars Earned (Savings and Investment)
• Goals Set: Homeownership, Healthcare, Education, etc.
• Progress to Goals
• Goals Achieved
• Wellness Index: Wealth and Well-Being of our Families

As well, we are a grant recipient from an impact-verification participant who will help us affirm through 3rd party process/data whether we are having a meaningful, longitudinal impact on the wealth and well-being of our families (the wellness index referred to above).

Here is an article highlighting that grant partnership.

• If consumers are given tools to demand a share of the profit they create from their collective 'investment' in rental real estate, and a safe place to put that money so it will work for them, they will recover more of their hard-earned wage dollars, and begin a generational wealth journey.
• If their landlords are given tools to provide profit-sharing through emphasis on key behaviors that drive increased profits to the property (boost NOI), then the operators of housing, and their financial supporters, will encourage the growth of the model.
• If A + B then in their lifetimes consumers can go from $0 to full participation in the middle class, with $250k+ in net wealth, closing the renter wealth equity gap, and healing a fractured social contract.

• SaaS software
• Fintech/BaaS partners
• AI - for example AI photo recognition to confirm you found your apartment's water cutoff valve
• Blockchain - for example our external impact validation partner Topl, which will allow any party to query our aggregate metrics for impact, in a way that cannot be altered by the interested party (us!)

Read more on that here.

• We are diverse by design.
• We believe technology built by the 99.8% will better serve the 99.8%, and that technology built for communities will be more efficient, and increase the net economics of our enterprise.
• We consider diversity across many dimensions, including racial, gender, economic, age, geography.

  

• We are a distributed U.S. team - from Florida to Hawaii - to allow more diverse participants to work with us and live where their community is.

For renters we offer:

• Fairness
• Cash they really need
• Banking they can trust
• Access to high-interest savings
• Access to risk-adjusted investment opportunities
• (coming soon) Right opportunities they pre-qualify for
• A Viva Score they can influence through their daily behaviors that can help them qualify for future housing, vs. biased credit scores

For landlords we offer:

• Efficiency
• Cash savings
• Increased Occupancy
• Increased Renter Loyalty (retention)
• Better Behaviors
• Better Communities
• Increased NOI (profit)
• Improved IRR
• Happier Investors
• ESG Metrics

Viva makes $100 per family per year - in the 'mid' vs. optimistic model - which we detail in a rich financial model, which means that our growth to 30,000+ families by the start of 2024, can drive revenue in excess of $3M in 2024!

We have earned $300k+ in revenue to date, and may reach $800k in 2023.

We make money via: B2B SaaS license fees, earnings off money we hold (float), and earnings from investment products or other opportunities our customers accept.

We have raised $800k+ in total funding, including ~$400k from non-dilutive sources like: real estate investments we control, Topl grant funding, and ~$400k in equity capital from partners like Techstars, and the Atlanta Tech Angels.

Additionally we have earned in excess of $300k in revenue to date, and project to earn $800k by EOY 2023.