Duppla doesn't look like your typical proptech darling. No slick app promising to revolutionize apartment hunting. No AI chatbotfielding maintenance requests. Instead, the Bogotá-based startup has built something decidedly more analog: a pathway for Colombian families locked out of traditional mortgages to eventually own homes.
And institutional investors, it turns out, are intrigued.
The company recently closed roughly $60 million in a mixed debt-and-equity round led by Patria Investments—one of the heftier proptech raises Colombia has seen. The deal, disclosed in a LinkedIn post this summer, brought together an eclectic group: Skandia Planeación Financiera's venture arm COMETA, Grupo Pegasus, and returning backer NAZCA. The exact debt-equity split? That's staying private for now.
What's less private is the ambition. Duppla plans to use the capital to buy more homes and push beyond Bogotá into other Colombian cities, testing whether its rent-to-own model—so far confined mostly to the capital—can travel.
Five Years to Ownership, If You Can Make It
Here's how it works. Duppla purchases residential properties through a fiduciary trust. Families put down an initial contribution, usually around 15 percent, then move in immediately. Over 60 months they build equity, paying monthly installments that run somewhere between 0.5 and 1 percent of the home's appraised value. At the end of five years, assuming all goes well, they exercise a purchase option and the place is theirs.
The target customer is someone conventional lenders won't touch. Credit scores as low as 400 (Colombia's scoring system is forgiving compared to, say, FICO thresholds in the U.S., though even here 400 is scraping bottom). Income multiples around 2.5 times monthly rent. No co-signer. For families navigating informal work, spotty credit histories, or simply bad luck, Duppla represents one of the few doors that might actually open.
According to the company, more than 300 families are already living in homes that will be theirs—a notable jump from the 100-plus figure that circulated in press reports back in September 2024. Growth, clearly. Whether it's sustainable growth is another question entirely.
Institutional Money Showed Up Early
Patria's involvement didn't materialize out of nowhere. Duppla had been quietly building credibility with institutional players well before this round. On December 5, 2023, Skandia's closed-end real estate fund acquired 90 percent of a residential portfolio that Duppla had originated, with an eye toward managing upwards of 250 homes over the following 18 months. That wasn't an equity stake—it was a portfolio deal—but it validated the underlying thesis: structured right, these assets could appeal to institutional capital.
COMETA came in at the pre-seed stage back in 2022. NAZCA, which lists Duppla among its proptech bridge investments, also returned. Grupo Pegasus is new money, joining what's starting to look like a coalition of believers.
Patria's presence is particularly telling. The São Paulo-based investment firm has been leaning into Colombia recently—launching a private equity fund that hit a first close of $140 million last November, structuring private credit vehicles across Latin America, deploying peso-denominated funds. Mixed debt-equity deals in local markets are increasingly their thing, and Duppla fits neatly into that playbook.
The Returns Pitch (And the Risks Underneath)
For investors, Duppla markets portfolios promising inflation-plus returns—specifically, Colombia's consumer price index plus 10.5 percent annually. The structure is a five-year trust backed by diversified residential assets under fiduciary management. Exit mechanics are defined upfront, sometimes involving third-party operators like Troop that handle leases with built-in inflation escalators and pre-set purchase prices at month 60.
It sounds neat on paper. Real-world execution tends to be messier.
Families at the margins of formal credit are, by definition, higher risk. Job instability, unexpected expenses, medical emergencies—any number of things can derail a five-year payment plan. Duppla's underwriting leans on behavioral data (the company recently integrated insights from Begini to refine its models), but predicting who will successfully navigate 60 months of payments remains more art than science. And if enough families fall out of the program, those tidy projected returns start looking shakier.
Then there's geography. Duppla operates mostly in Bogotá, where it knows the neighborhoods, the buyer profiles, the regulatory quirks. Expanding to other Colombian cities means learning new markets from scratch—local housing stock, income patterns, municipal regulations. Scale isn't always linear in real estate.
Policy Winds at Their Back
Timing may help. Colombia's housing finance landscape is shifting in ways that could benefit alternative models like Duppla's. Earlier this year, the national savings fund FNA announced plans for 100 percent financing on social-interest housing. Whether that creates tailwinds for rent-to-own schemes—or inadvertently competes with them by making mortgages slightly more accessible—remains to be seen.
The company itself has been collecting accolades. Founders Cristian Villamizar (Harvard Business School) and Felipe Fierro (MIT) launched Duppla in 2022; it now employs around 46 people, according to LinkedIn. This year brought selection into Endeavor Colombia's Scale Up program, the kind of institutional embrace that opens doors (and checkbooks).
Still, $60 million is a serious bet on an unproven model at scale. Patria clearly thinks Duppla can thread the needle—balancing affordability for buyers with risk-adjusted returns for investors, and doing so across multiple cities. But rent-to-own programs have stumbled before, in Colombia and elsewhere, when underwriting got sloppy or economic conditions shifted.
For the 300-plus families already living in Duppla homes, the company represents something straightforward: a shot at ownership that wouldn't otherwise exist. Whether that number scales to thousands—and whether the unit economics hold—will determine if this becomes a blueprint or a footnote. Patria, for its part, is betting on the former. The next couple years will reveal if they're right.
