The SME Story: Rami Tabbara, co-founder and co-CEO of Stake

What is the core concept of Stake?
Stake is a digital fractional real estate investment platform. It enables anyone from anywhere in the world to invest in rental properties in Dubai and earn monthly rental income in under three minutes.

Stake was built for people who want to invest in rental properties but don’t want to buy a whole home, take on a loan, or deal with the operational headaches.

Give us a business overview of Stake.
We launched our business in January 2021 and closed our seed round of $4m in June 2021. Since our launch, we have 20,000 users and $10m of assets under management. The current team size is 22 people split between Dubai, Portugal, Azerbaijan, the UK and India. We’re currently based in Dubai, but we will be expanding into international markets very soon.

What are some of the challenges you’ve encountered while growing your business?
I would say the biggest challenge we’ve encountered was raising awareness about Stake. With so many fintechs being launched in the region, it becomes more challenging to reach consumers, especially on the B2C side. Your product, messaging, branding and offering needs to be different and louder than others.

What steps have you taken to ensure that you are leveraging the latest technology?
Technology is at the core of everything we do. One of the most important partnerships we’ve done is with the MIT Capstone project in building a data ingestion and analytics model that collects historical market data on the residential market in Dubai dating back more than 10 years to evaluate the quality of potential real estate deals and forecast their returns under varying local and macro future conditions. We worked with two data scientists on incorporating a large feature set of real and engineered descriptors, which will allow the model to forecast and predict price levels down to the specificity of a single building or apartment. This will enable us to scale and automate property acquisition and ensure we are selecting the
best properties.

What are your growth plans?
We will be expanding into Saudi Arabia in 2022 and Egypt in 2023. We will also be listing properties in London in 2022. We have already launched a new vertical called StakeCasa which is the modern way of buying and owning a second home for 1/10th of the price.

We are the first to offer this kind of product in MENA and believe there is huge potential in taking this offering into the popular touristic destinations that most of the MENA travellers go to such as Spain, Greece and France.