Meet the Startups of the HouseMark Evolve Programme!

We are very excited to have 6 disruptive startups from across Europe join our accelerator. The first of its kind, HouseMark evolve is comprised of 18 partners, all working together to support these startups in their endeavour to disrupt the social housing sector.
The aim of the programme is to bring together housing providers and the right startups to give tenants a better experience, and to innovate current processes in order to overcome the current challenges of the sector.

We spent some time talking with them finding out about their experience so far and what they plan to get out of the programme

Plentific
Plentific is the UK’s only transactional Home Services Marketplace, making it easy to find, hire and pay verified home service professionals and tradesmen.
Working closely with the leading housing providers, Plentific aims to provide a higher quality of service to hundreds of thousands of customers and produce better outcomes for the providers.

We asked Plentific what they think the future holds for social housing: “ We need to replace outdated legacy systems and reduce costly admin time. Improving operating margins will free up additional funds to further develop much needed affordable homes.”

Illumr
Illumr offers better understanding of the patterns of behaviour by revealing insights hidden in data and empowers companies with more informed decision making.
Illumr aims to get market validation through focussed pilots and believes that the biggest challenge of the housing sector is the asset management and the customer base analytics solutions.

How could Illumr disrupt the market? “We will deliver a managed service to help reveal insights for competitive advantage”

Standard Access
Standard Access offers totally digital, access based account management. Landlords can issue keys to tenants and users via the cloud, removing the need for physical keys and key cards. As such, it eliminates the hassle and cost associated with changing locks.
According to the Standard Access team, the future of social housing lies in identifying innovative solutions on cost cutting and digitisation of existing processes.

Housemark is a unique opportunity. We asked Standard Access what they joined the programme: “We want to get a clear understanding of housing providers to tweak our solution to this sector’s specific requirements, access new clients and get investment opportunities”.

Rapid Information Systems
Rapid Information systems is a low-code web and mobile application builder. It allows great software to be created quickly and at low cost.
For them, HouseMark is a great opportunity to increase their customer base and learn from senior executives of the sector.

On the challenges of the housing sector,Rapid shared: “Shrinking financial contribution by central government and limited number of dated software providers that are expensive, and hold back access to data and innovation”.

Skenario Labs
Skenario Labs is a predictive data-analytics company for property owners. Their service can digitalise any property portfolio in two days and at the same time introduce data-driven predictiveness to building lifecycle management. They are based in Finland and HouseMark Evolve is a great opportunity for them to introduce their product to the UK market and work with some of the biggest housing providers.

We asked Skenarios what they’ve learnt so far: “The biggest highlight, from the initial talks with the providers, so far, has been the feedback that the problem we’re solving is actually larger scale than expected and that we might actually bring something totally new to UK’s housing sector.”

Coheat
Coheat helps deliver smart heat networks for retrofit and new building housing, which are simpler, more reliable, more efficient and more affordable than installing individual boilers in every home.
COHEAT hopes to understand the range of heat network related challenges and opportunities in the housing sector through the programme; test a beta version of our “everything you need to be a retail utility company in a box” offering with at least one provider; and explore how heat networks could fit in new build housing and regeneration programmes going forwards.

We wanted to find out more about Coheat’ experience of the programme so far: “It’s great fun! The programme provides the opportunity for startups to pilot bleeding-edge, work-in-progress, versions of products and services the users far earlier, more extensively, and more productively than we would otherwise be able to.”

The programme will end with Demo Day at the end of February, where startups will showcase their progression and the development of their products and services over these 12 weeks.