Israeli Founders Building a FinTech Venture: Omri Dor, Co-Founder and COO of Obligo (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: When you went out for seed funding, what did you have? Did you have an MVP?

Omri Dor: We started working on it. In the beginning, it was me and Roey. For his other businesses, he had this building with offices. We were sitting there figuring out some stuff. We started thinking about what the product would look like. At that time, the market we had in mind was the Israeli market, which is a peer-to-peer, single renter, single landlord.

We thought we were going to design some sort of a consumer app. It’s going to do everything. You’re going to sign the contract, pay your rent, and all these things. Then we tried to think why would anyone pay for this. Would you pay to have your contract signed online? The answer is no. Would you pay to have your money transmitted electronically? At that time in Israel, no.

What are people going to pay for? That’s when we stumbled on the area of the deposit. Maybe when you work with Obligo, you won’t need to pay a deposit. We did some surveys. We were using online platforms for surveys. We were using AYTM [Ask Your Target Market] at that time. We presented renters with a hypothetical situation and asked them if they’re willing to pay a fee. We took that fee and multiplied it with all the apartments in Israel. We figured out that there’s no market in Israel. Whatever we build in Israel cannot be easily transferred to another country because of the regulatory differences.

So we searched for another market. I was talking to all my friends in different countries. I was trying to understand what the real-estate ecosystem looks like there. It’s very different. In the US, you don’t rent directly from the landlord. There is a property management company. We also found that, unlike Israel where there’s no software solution, people had solutions to make things more efficient.

In Israel, we’re thinking our app is going to handle rent payment. In other countries, they have all these software packages. They do accounting, rent payment, and all these other things. We took a carving knife. We eliminated everything else. We were only going to do the deposit piece. There was a period of time where we thought that London would be the best market.

The reason was there was a lot of regulations in the UK specifically about how security deposits are managed for renters and landlords. Essentially the renter has to put the deposit with the government. If the landlord wants to take something from the deposit, the renter would have to agree. We started traveling to London and this led to our meeting with a particular investment. The investor was 83North. They’re a phenomenal fund. They used to be known as Greylock Israel.

We met a partner in the UK called David Buttress. There was an interesting fit with this fund because they were both in the UK and Israel. They were doing a lot of FinTech. There was a little bit of a strategy match. Maybe that’s the first advice I would give. When you talk to a fund, the fund also has a strategy.

Sramana Mitra: We stress the concept of investor-entrepreneur fit as a requirement. If you want the funding to happen, you have to find that fit. 83North decided to invest?

Omri Dor: Yes. What we had was this market research, surveys showing how much renters were willing to pay, and some regulatory research. Number two is, we had two phenomenal amazing developers who I shamelessly stole from the cyber-intelligence company I was working at before. Today, they are our CTO and VP of R&D.

The four of us were the founding team. The reason I mention that is because the investors saw the technological capacity to delivery. I would say we came with a sufficient technology DNA that inspired confidence.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Israeli Founders Building a FinTech Venture: Omri Dor, Co-Founder and COO of Obligo
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