Company profile

YALO is a Nigerian rent-financing platform that removes the burden of upfront rent by paying landlords in full while customers repay in manageable monthly instalments over six, nine, or twelve months. Designed for individuals and businesses alike, YALO enables renters to secure or renew a home without lump-sum payments or high-interest borrowing from friends and family. Through the YALO Marketplace, customers can also furnish their homes, bundling furniture, electronics, and moving services from over 70 trusted brands into the same flexible, all-in-one payment plan as their rent.

Why we invested

In most of the world, rent is a monthly rhythm. In much of Nigeria, it is an annual ambush. Landlords often demand a full year, sometimes two, paid upfront, while the tenant earns their living the way everyone does, month by month. The result traps people who are perfectly able to afford their home. A salaried worker who could comfortably pay each month is turned away, or pushed into punishing, informal loans, simply because they cannot produce twelve months of rent in a single lump. That mismatch is the problem YALO was built to solve.

YALO finances rent, converting that impossible annual demand into instalments aligned to how people are actually paid. Traditional lenders see an emerging rent-financing category, working-capital-intensive and short on hard security, and hesitate to offer credit. What the traditional lenders underappreciate is the quiet power of YALO's model: by working through employers and salary-linked collections, it turns what looks like unsecured consumer lending into something far more predictable. The very feature that makes traditional lenders nervous – the absence of conventional collateral – is offset by something arguably better, repayment wired to the paycheque itself.

What gave us the confidence to lend was a well-rounded founding team and a book that already works. Management brings relevant experience across technology, real estate, investment banking, operations and capital structuring, and diligence showed they had not only identified the pain point but built the systems, partnerships and repayment processes to address it commercially. Its income is recurring and predictable: interest earned on rent-financing facilities, repaid month after month through salary-linked and employer-enabled collections, which is precisely the flow that services our facility. 

And what the capital unlocks is the reason we are glad to provide it. Our facility lets YALO expand its loan book, fund more employer-led and staff-housing transactions, and convert a growing pipeline of demand into real financing. In human terms, that is more people keeping the home they can already afford, spared the annual scramble and the predatory loans that fill the gap, able to pay for their roof the same way they pay for everything else. We lent to YALO because putting that capital to work means more families housed on terms that finally fit their lives.