Cleo Housing: Find housing through people you trust.

How might we help people living between cities find trusted homes and meaningful connections — without relying on strangers or overpriced platforms?

Introduction

Cleo Housing was born inside Blas&Co Ventures from a simple but powerful insight: people with dynamic, multi-city lives — freelancers, founders, designers, and remote professionals — struggle to find safe, affordable, and trustworthy places to live.
While Airbnb fatigue grows and urban housing becomes chaotic and unaffordable, most people still rely on WhatsApp groups, DMs, or friends-of-friends to find homes. We saw an opportunity to bring structure, trust, and design into this messy reality.

Cleo Housing is a trust-first home-swapping and cost-based renting platform that lets users find homes through people they trust.
Built on a social graph, Cleo shows who you’re connected to (like LinkedIn) and turns shared housing opportunities into a dedicated, story-like feed — simple, visual, and human.

Our mission: to redefine how modern nomads and polycity professionals find and share homes — by making trust the currency of housing.

The Challenge

Europe’s housing crisis isn’t just about affordability — it’s about trust and access.

• 60% of Europeans say housing feels unreliable or unaffordable.
• 70% don’t feel comfortable staying in a stranger’s home.
• 80% of housing opportunities never reach the right people because they’re shared chaotically across private networks.

Meanwhile, remote work has decoupled where people live from where they work. A new generation of professionals lives across multiple cities, spending months in Lisbon, Amsterdam, or Barcelona, but existing platforms weren’t built for them.
Airbnb has become too commercial and regulated. Facebook groups are messy and unverified. Sublets are high-risk.

So how might we create a trusted, community-driven alternative, one that feels personal, transparent, and flexible?

Methodologies Used

• User research with remote workers, founders, and creatives living between 2–3 cities to map their struggles with finding homes and verifying trust.
• Trust-layer mapping: identifying social-graph signals (mutual friends, communities, shared workplaces) that create safety and comfort.
• Validation sprints with early users and curated communities like Norrsken, Soho House, and design collectives.
• AI-assisted matching prototype using community data to suggest relevant, verified housing opportunities.
• MVP build focused on a simple flow: list, discover, and connect — all anchored around mutual trust and community ties.

Impact

Cleo Housing bridges the gap between housing platforms and human networks.
It redefines digital housing by introducing a trust-as-infrastructure model, where access comes through relationships, not algorithms.

The MVP allows users to:

• Discover homes shared by friends-of-friends or trusted communities.
• Earn or spend credits to swap or rent at cost.
• Join curated city communities that align with their lifestyle and network.

For professionals living between cities, Cleo creates a smoother, safer housing experience that combines flexibility, affordability, and belonging.

Team & Origin

Cleo was incubated within Blas&Co Ventures as part of its “Ventures” track, where internal ideas are validated, prototyped, and launched into the market.
The project is co-founded by Alejandra Godó (Strategic Designer & Founder at Blas&Co) and Egor Kopylov (Product Engineer), who together lead Cleo’s product, brand, and community strategy.

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