Announcing the Genesis Investment in ScholarHuts
On behalf of Genesis, I’m excited to announce our investment in ScholarHuts. ScholarHuts makes finding student housing (and roommates) simple through a match-based housing platform.
— Quinn Collins, Eric Lin, & Anuj Jajoo
The Problem
Housing is a yearly decision for most college students in America, especially in public universities that have smaller, city-centric campuses and limited dormitory space. At UT alone, 86% of the student population, including approximately 30,600 undergraduate students, live off-campus every year and make a recurring combination of decisions revolving around where to live and whom to live with. Leasing generally kicks off at the beginning of the year, where students are often unfamiliar with potential roommates or the general geography of their campus and nearby living spaces. Andrew, ScholarHut’s founder, conducted a primary survey of 87 people at the peak of this period (at the end of September) which quantified that a majority of students had not yet found their housing for the upcoming year. Failing to sign apartments in this hectic period can make prime locations and floor plans unavailable, which disadvantages both apartments and students.
For students, this entire process is confusing, fast-paced, and can result in much costlier choices from both a financial and satisfaction perspective. For apartments, there are many moving parts in finding willing tenants, and there is an equal pressure to squeeze in as many leases as possible into a shorter housing period.
Andrew Young created ScholarHuts in response to these challenges. By creating an integrated platform through which students can find housing, roommates, and sign leases — with additional features currently in development — he hopes to simplify the housing-search process for college students.
The Founder
ScholarHuts was founded by Andrew Young, a UT computer science junior.
Andrew is a former founder of two different ventures and brings a strong technical background as a freelance software developer and part-time software engineer at Cirrus Logic. He clearly has a zeal for entrepreneurship and is self- driven, having conducted all company research, apartment agreements, coding, and design to create the current product on his own. His need for solving the roommate/apartment finding problem come from personal experience — missing the peak leasing period in early parts of the school year and being forced to independently make up for it afterwards using decentralized and largely nonexistent solutions.
How’s he doing
Andrew has been working tirelessly on his platform over the past couple of months and has since seen an active user base of over 400 UT students, after soft launching in October. In the next few months, he plans to achieve 800 applications to tour apartments and 50 signed leases through the platform, among other goals. We look forward to ScholarHuts’ continued progress as it tries to solve the housing and roommate search crisis for UT students.
Why I led this deal by Quinn Collins
When Andrew first pitched ScholarHuts to Genesis, I was immediately struck by how competent he was. He single handedly built his platform while conducting the necessary consumer research. I fully resonate with Andrew’s diagnosis that students’ housing decision making can be bogged down by choice-overload — a problem that arises in most areas of our lives nowadays. I was therefore impressed by Andrew’s drive to simplify the housing-search process, using a Tinder-esque mechanism that also integrates a roommate matching mechanism as well. We at Genesis are excited to bring Andrew on and look forward to a fruitful partnership with ScholarHuts.
Written by Quinn Collins, Venture Partner
Published by Anuj Jajoo, Portfolio Management Associate
