Gerade heute rücken plattformbasierte Geschäftsmodelle immer mehr in den Fokus. Aus gutem Grund: Denn Plattformen können eine Vielzahl von Dienstleistungen an einem Ort anbieten. Bei hypcloud sehen wir diesen Vorteil als tägliche Motivation, unseren Nutzern eine All-in-One-Lösung anzubieten, die die Strukturierung ihrer Finanzierungen deutlich vereinfacht — alles transparent, mit verschiedenen Teilnehmern und von überall zugänglich. Wir haben unseren französischen Co-Geschäftsführer und Chief Technology Officer Yann Basly gefragt, wie sich unsere Plattform derzeit entwickelt und wie wir unseren Kunden das Leben leichter machen wollen.
What trends do you see in the digitalization of the real estate industry?
Well, we can't talk about trends without mentioning AI and Large Language Models (LLM) and tools such as OpenAI's ChatGPT. It's very fresh and everyone is still exploring the new capabilities those bring. One quick example: our industry still relies a lot on data buried in PDF or DOC documents. LLMs can be used to precisely extract data and information from them, seamlessly, more directly related to our industry, we see more and more quality APIs made available: for instance providing market insights, or bridging with the non digitised world. This allows platforms like hypcloud to connect to those APIs and provide additional value and convenience to users and close more and more gaps in digitised workflows.
What role is hypcloud playing in this?
We already connect today hundreds of project developers, investors, lenders and brokers on our B2B platform. As we grow our business, we are becoming more attractive as partners for other service providers and by that create more and more value for our clients. And that is what we strive for. We have built our software in a way that allows us to easily connect to any other app.
You have worked in other industries before you co-founded hypcloud. What do you think, why it has taken longer for the real estate industry to embrace the benefits of and the need for digitalisation?
It's the sum of several factors. The nature of the industry itself, which has existed since forever in an analog way, while building on top of multiple layers of legacy processes. Also the market was very good in the last decades, showing great margins and growth, and thus there was no need to change how the business is done.
Now we see a stronger push for digitalisation, what has changed?
Digitalization is happening everywhere, it's just natural as people expect the same user experience as in their personal use of the web. Also, ESG is a strong catalyst, no one can expect to fulfil the ambitious targets without data and software solutions.
Please, take us on a quick journey through the evolution of the hypcloud platform. When you started to develop the software with your team, what have been the guiding principles or core beliefs?
Two things guided the development of the hypcloud platform:
First, we wanted to give more transparency to borrowers: that means the borrower is in control of their data and who can see it. By default, projects on hypcloud are only presented to lenders chosen by the borrower.
Second, we wanted to simplify and speed up the whole process of finding the right potential financing partners and get the negotiations started. With the hypcloud platform, a borrower can, within a day, describe their need for financing, upload their documents, select among our network of more than 430 lenders the ones that are the most appropriate, and start negotiations. At the end of day 1, the borrower can start negotiating not with one or two lenders, but potentially 15 interested lenders.
What have been decisive and exciting moments on that journey?
When we started, we had lots of features to build: dataroom, chat room, task management system, document generation, notification system, automated processes, all with a small team. We needed a tech stack with few moving parts, while at the same time being simple, maintainable, fault tolerant: we went with Elixir/Phoenix and Vuejs. This paid off greatly.
The first projects created, the first joining lenders were for sure very special. It's incredible to think that since then we now have more than 780 projects and 430 lenders on our platform. This was only made possible thanks to our team. Every new hire was an exciting new step in hypcloud.
Where are you aiming at next with the platform?
We started a new project: We are co-creating together with our clients.
This sounds really interesting. Tell us more…
Recently we started to collaborate with a few very good clients more closely on the design of new features. We also do previewing new features with them. The background is that we value our customers’ ideas and they give us a lot of good input that makes our services better. Our goal with this is to create something that is as close as possible to our customers’ needs.
If you are also planning a new project and need financing, try it out yourself. Check out our platform where you can easily create a project within a few minutes: www.hypcloud.de
