Hmlet sizes down again amid difficult pivot, but it’s making progress

Prominent co-living startup Hmlet, which rents residential properties to young professionals, has been dealt a series of bad hands lately.

After racking up a US$40 million stack from well-known investors in July 2019, the Singapore-headquartered company rapidly signed new leases and swelled its ranks with new hires.

Photo credit: Hmlet

But in early 2020, it laid off at least 10% of its staff. They were unfortunate casualties of the company’s shift to an “asset-light” model, Hmlet’s CEO Yoan Kamalski had told Tech in Asia then.

That said, things were still looking up. Kamalski told us that the company had no plans to fundraise, and that it would hire more people than it had let go of.

Then the world took a turn: Covid-19 became a once-in-a-generation crisis, causing country after country to shut their borders.

Expats, which make up most of Hmlet’s customers, returned home and left behind empty rooms. The company then began to bleed cash and its financial runway shrank, leading to successive retrenchments, according to Tech in Asia’s sources.

We spoke to five people familiar with the company’s operations for this story.

In a more recent interview with this publication, Kamalski confirms the layoffs, adding that the company would be left with just half of its peak headcount after the latest cuts.

He has also changed his tune on fundraising, confirming that the startup hopes to close a round in the next few weeks.

He says that the money would come from both existing as well as new investors. He also claims that there’s been no pressure from investors to cut costs in exchange for new funding.

Meanwhile, a source points out that Hmlet has been on the mend since the travel disruptions, with properties being filled up again. “We’re doing pretty okay,” he says.

A risky start

Despite being a startup, Hmlet, in some ways, wasn’t a speedboat. In the beginning, it had no other choice but to sign multi-year leases, which can be risky.

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The fruits of its labor