Guarantee for your rent? Takeem co-founder Rakesh tells us what it took to build the UAE’s first rental guarantee product

611.8k — that’s how many residential transactions Rakesh Mavath (LinkedIn) and his co-founder Pooja Vithlani (LinkedIn) had to sift through to build datasets to back what would become the UAE’s first rental guarantee product. Their startup, Takeem, is now backed by Second Century Ventures, the strategic investment arm of the US National Association of Realtors (NAR), one of the world’s largest proptech venture capital investors.

With a lengthy runway, a lean team, and incredibly fortunate timing, they’re now at the peak of their growth cycle — thus far — with 900% growth week-on-week, as market demand skyrockets on the back of more uncertainty and cost pressures amid regional geopolitical tensions.

Each week, My Morning Routine looks at how a successful member of the community starts their day — and then throws in a couple of random business questions just for fun. Speaking to us this week is Rakesh, who takes us through how he and his co-founder started the business, why it’s so in demand right now, and how his routine helps set him up for the day. Edited excerpts of our conversation:

EnterpriseAM: First of all, tell me the story behind Takeem. How did it start?

Rakesh Mavath: It came together through the combination of a tenant and a landlord. I’m a co-founder who’s a tenant, and my other co-founder is a landlord. I knew the frustrations from the tenant side: security deposits not being returned, having to pay in cheques, having to pay upfront rather than monthly. My co-founder had the frustrations from the landlord’s point of view of chasing tenants for payments, getting 2 am maintenance-related phone calls, etc.

We started exploring those frustrations and speaking to people within the ecosystem, and the one thing that was clear was rent was a source of exasperation for most people in Dubai.

We didn't see renting as a zero-sum game where one person has to win and another has to lose. What we wanted was to create a solution where everyone wins. We looked at it as a first-principles model and found that the friction stems from mistrust, so we needed a product that built that trust layer for the whole rental market.

E: How do you build that trust? How does the product work?

RV: The key product we offer is a rental guarantee, which offers protection for landlords if their tenants default. If the tenant can’t pay, the landlord gets 4-6 months of their rent, depending on the reason why the tenant couldn’t pay. We also include emergency maintenance cover and a direct debit offer, meaning digital payments straight into the landlord’s bank account instead of the managing of cheques.

We had to build that product from scratch, because while rental protection products are available in the UK, US, and Australia, and they're actually a core ingredient of more mature rental markets, it wasn't available here in the GCC because there was no data available publicly for defaults and delays. We had to build that to be able to convince our partners that there was a need for this product in the market.

In order to get that data, we had to do a lot of groundwork. We had to knock on the doors of family offices and asset and property managers to get a combination of public and private datasets.

E: Why did you start with B2B first?

RV: Property managers, agencies, and family offices are the gatekeepers to the landlords. They have the information there. They are able to educate the landlord on our product, and they also are at risk when a tenant defaults. When a landlord has a tenant default, who does he blame? The agent or property manager who put the tenant in there. The landlord takes the financial risk, and the agent or property manager takes the reputational risk.

We are adding B2C now, offering the product to individual landlords, and again, it helps both parties — the tenant and the landlord — to have a guarantee in place. What we saw previously was a tenant would lose their job or get diagnosed with a critical illness and they’d be forced to make the very difficult decision of paying rent or other essential expenses. With the guarantee, they both know they’re covered in case of emergencies.

E: It’s great timing for a product like that. Costs are rising, there’s layoffs, some people left Dubai on a whim… so the rental market could see some stress. What has demand looked like in the past two months?

RV: The demand for Takeem has grown exponentially. There’s been a lot of job losses across the tourism, hospitality, retail, and energy sectors. Even before this situation, we had said the short-term risks in the market are affordability, job security, because we’d seen some strain across low and mid-white collar industries as they optimized and increased their use of AI, and geopolitical events.

Right now, we’ve seen a convergence of risks that we probably haven't seen since 2020 at both a macro and a micro level. A huge bulk of the customers we spoke to in the past year who felt this was a nice-to-have product have come back, said it’s now a must-have, and signed with Takeem in the last two months. We’ve seen 900% week-on-week growth in customers, and we think that’s just because it was the right product at the right time, with a strong team and positioning.

E: Onto your morning routine, what does that look like on a regular day?

RV:I’m a very early riser. I’m a morning person and I love a sunrise, so I’m always up before the sunrise. I like to start my day with swimming, surfing, or running; something to get my mind set up for the rest of the day. I grew up on the ocean in Australia — the beach was 15 meters from my house — so I’ve surfed ever since.

Previously, I probably wouldn't look at anything work-related till about 7am, but now it’s more like 6am. The hours are definitely longer and we’re making our meetings shorter to be able to handle the pace of things right now.

Pooja’s handling the tech side of things, so I don't have to worry so much about that, and for me it’s usually sales meeting after sales meeting. We will talk probably twice a day to bring each other up to speed on what’s happening on each of the different elements of the business. Right now I find myself working up until 10-11pm, but I love it. I just feel super excited more than anything.

Rakesh’s recommendations

What he’s reading: I love to read both to acquire knowledge and for entertainment after a long day. 1929 by Aaron Ross Sorkin is an excellent read to help satisfy the knowledge and learning side of things, and my current read for pure entertainment purposes is a book called Dungeon Crawler Carl. I love it because there’s a main character in there that’s a cat — Princess Donut — and she vocalizes everything I think my own cat also thinks.

Where he surfs: Sunset near Burj Al Arab. Nikki Beach is another good one, and there’s the wave park open in Abu Dhabi, and some spots in Fujairah and Umm Al Quwain as well.

A piece of advice he has for new founders: Build relationships. The UAE, and the Arab world more generally, is a relationship economy. It takes time and they may not seem fruitful at the time, but they will become fruitful if they are the right relationships. In Dubai, that could also mean people in government and the regulators, whose doors are always open, which is something you don’t get in many other countries.