A family fixer and proptech CEO: How Rashed Hareb manages a family of 9 siblings and an early-stage startup

The day Dubai Land Department (DLD) launched its Flexi Rent initiative, 14 people forwarded the news to Rashed Hareb (LinkedIn) — most of them asking whether it was the end of his proptech business. Hareb, co-founder and CEO of Rentify, had spent two years working with the DLD to get the scheme off the ground, and had already been steering the company away from the product it launched on. Monthly rent plans, once 100% of the business, now make up just 10-15%.

What Rentify has done instead is pitch itself as the back office for renting in the UAE. Tenants can split rent into monthly payments financed by partner banks or swap their checks for digital payments. Landlords get Earn AI, an agent-based platform launched alongside a USD 2 mn seed round in June, which drafts payment reminders, handles renewals, and most recently, dispatches maintenance vendors over WhatsApp. Rentify has 180k units signed and wants 50k of them live on the platform by year-end. It’s raising again to get there.

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. This week, we spoke with Hareb about why Flexi Rent hasn’t hurt Rentify, the case for keeping a human in the loop, and the calls from home he can never quite ignore. Edited excerpts from our conversation:

EnterpriseAM: How would you introduce yourself to someone who doesn’t know you?

Rashed Hareb (RH): As a sibling — I’m the seventh of nine brothers and sisters. Since I was 16, I’ve been taking care of everything that comes with the house. I’ve handled a lot of the family’s business, and with 15 nieces and nephews, the responsibilities only get bigger.

I’d also say I’m a guy who’s passionate about business. We spent summers in the UK, where my dad gave us a weekly allowance of GBP 10. My brother recently reminded me that I’d end the week with GBP 25 or so, because I was lending money to my siblings and making a return on it.

E: Where did the idea for Rentify come from?

RH: It’s been with me since 2012, when I was doing my MBA in London. Renting there was far easier, especially when it came to payments and deposits. But the UAE market wasn’t ready — it wasn’t digitized. One of the banks tried something similar in 2018 or 2019, but there wasn’t the need or the push for it yet. In the meantime, I franchised an ice cream business out of Dubai. We signed franchise agreements for 180 units across 10 countries, and about 40 were open, from Portugal and Sweden to India and Nigeria, before Covid forced us to close. I’ve also managed the family’s real estate portfolio since 2015. I’m a landlord myself, so I see the problems firsthand.

E: How does the model work?

RH: We started with a simple problem: tenants want to pay monthly, but landlords want their money upfront. My co-founder Rajneel Kumar and I could have gone the classic route — take the money on our books and lend it to tenants, but thank God we didn’t. The cost of money was too high, tenants would have paid a lot, and the only gainer would have been the landlord. Instead, we built an embedded finance solution with banks in the UAE. A tenant applies on the platform, gets approved or rejected instantly, and pays monthly, while the landlord gets paid in advance. The lending doesn’t sit with us.

Then we added Flex, for people who simply want to pay their checks digitally, and Belong, an experience-based rewards program. We stayed away from vouchers and freebies. You pay your rent, then take your kids to a painting class or get a complimentary cryotherapy session.

E: When the DLD launched flexible rent payments, plenty of people assumed it would hurt you. Did it?

RH: We’d been working with them on it for two years. When we started, the business was 100% monthly payments; today it’s about 10-15%. That was a strategic shift — we knew this was coming, and we pushed for it. Everything in Dubai had been digitized except paying rent. It helped bring more people to our platform.

Every time an initiative like this comes out, more people apply to register on our platform. It also closes a gap for us. When a tenant whose landlord isn’t on the platform wants to pay monthly, we need the landlord’s bank details. In one case, a tenant paid a big amount and the landlord refused it — he wanted his check. The DLD pushing landlords to register their bank accounts means we can actually pay them. We’re trying to get embedded with the DLD directly.

E: Where does AI fit in?

RH: We built Earn AI for landlords. You upload whatever data you have — Excel, PDF, even WhatsApp — and within 60 seconds you have a dashboard of your portfolio. What existed before stopped there; you couldn’t act on it. We’ve embedded the financial side, so a landlord can send a payment link, and the tenant can pay monthly while the landlord receives the money upfront or quarterly.

We’ve built six agents: three are live, and the rest will be ready before year-end. A property manager comes in and sees five units are due today; the agent has drafted the email with the payment link and asks, “Can I go ahead?” There’s always a human in the loop. Our maintenance agent works over WhatsApp, because that’s what tenants use: they message the issue, and the agent finds the right vendor and schedules the job. The legal agent, still in development, grew out of landlords asking us to streamline what happens when a tenant doesn’t pay.

E: What’s the new round for?

RH: We’ve done two rounds, and we’re in another now. We have 180k units signed, and we’re targeting at least 50k active by the end of this year, so the first priority is activation. The second is products like the legal agent. The third is expansion: we’re already testing with clients in the GCC, and we’re in talks with a partner to white-label the platform beyond the region.

E: A family of 9 and 15 nieces and a startup — how do you manage your day? Is a routine even possible?

RH: I wake up around 7-7:30. I’m not waking up at 4am — I tried it, and it doesn’t make sense if you’re running a startup. I recently realized I can’t work out in the morning because I always wake up in a hurry, even if my first commitment isn’t until 9. So I work out at the end of the day, and I’ve picked up golf, with classes at least once a week. Beyond that, my schedule is all over the place between investors, the team, product, and partners. I don’t think I’ve had three consistent days in the last two years.

On managing — it’s a challenge. Yesterday, I was in a meeting when my sister called, then my mom. I stepped out thinking something had happened. My mom just wanted to change the tint on her car. But you can’t just block it out. We have family lunch every Friday, and if I make it, I get to see everyone.

E: What did running a big team in your twenties teach you?

RH: At 26, I had about 150 people working for the ice cream business. One of our franchisees in Kuwait, my friend Hamad, runs brands like Caribou Coffee, Cinnabon, and Five Guys. He told me, “We’re not in the food business. We’re in the people management business.” That stuck. We once hired a 19-year-old as an office boy, sent him to help at an event, and he did three times the sales of anyone else. Within a year and a half, he was managing our biggest unit, in Dubai Mall, and he went on to train every new team we set up in India, our biggest market.

Rashed’s favorites

What he’s reading: Our Moment by Michael Clark, which explains technology and data as if speaking to a 10-year-old.

What he listens to: Football podcasts — I’m an Arsenal fan.

His hobbies: I taught myself piano on YouTube during Covid. Within six months, I was playing Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, and now I can learn most songs in a couple of hours.