Student accommodation marketplace
Uniplaces is a Lisbon-founded marketplace for student and mid-term rental housing across European university cities.
Founded in 2013 by Ben Grech, Miguel Amaro and Mariano Kostelec - three ex-King's College London students who had personally struggled to find apartments abroad - the platform targets the mid-term (one-to-twelve months) rental segment that sits between short-term platforms like Airbnb and full long-term lettings.
It operates in dozens of cities including Lisbon, Porto, Madrid, Barcelona, Rome, Milan, Berlin and Paris.
The company raised a Series B of $24M in 2016 led by Atomico, with Octopus Ventures and Shilling Capital Partners participating across earlier rounds. After a tough 2018-2020 stretch that included rightsizing, Uniplaces refocused on supply quality, verified landlords and integrated rental guarantees. Student mobility post-COVID and pan-European digital-nomad flows have returned the business to growth.
The legal entity is Uniplaces, Lda. - a Portuguese Sociedade por Quotas - which is an unusual structure at Series B (most peers would have redomiciled to Delaware or the UK by that point).
Uniplaces is a useful counterpoint to the Delaware-parented majority in this list. Ben Grech, Miguel Amaro and Mariano Kostelec kept the company's legal home in Portugal as a Sociedade por Quotas (Lda.) even after raising a $24M Series B from Atomico in 2016.
The reasons are a mix of founder preference, a European investor base that was comfortable with Portuguese corporate law, and a commercial model (EU student housing) where there was no meaningful US TAM to justify a US parent. This is the decision many European-focused marketplaces eventually make, and Uniplaces is a clean reference for it.
The Portuguese Lda. structure has real constraints at Series B/C. Preferred shares do not map cleanly onto Portuguese quotas - investors either accept ordinary-quota structures with heavy shareholder-agreement overlays, or the company carves out a UK/Luxembourg feeder that issues preferred shares and in turn holds the Portuguese Lda.
Uniplaces took the shareholder-agreement route, which is workable but makes a US IPO or large US growth round materially harder. In practice this is the trade the founders accepted: lower maximum exit multiple in exchange for simpler local operations and more founder control.
The company's operational story is also illustrative of the Lisbon ecosystem's 2015-2020 arc. It scaled fast, over-scaled, rightsized, and rebuilt around unit economics. Web Summit's relocation to Lisbon and the NHR regime (pre-2024) drove up long-term rent demand; Uniplaces pivoted from pure-student toward nomad-friendly mid-term housing.
The 2024 NHR overhaul has changed the composition of that demand (fewer high-income foreign retirees, more on-payroll remote workers), but the structural shortage of quality mid-term stock in Lisbon, Madrid and Milan continues to favour supply-marketplace models. Uniplaces today runs profitably on a smaller cost base than at peak.
It is an online marketplace for mid-term (one-to-twelve months) student and young-professional housing across European university cities.
Yes - Uniplaces is a Portuguese Lda. (Sociedade por Quotas) headquartered in Lisbon. Unlike most of its unicorn peers, it did not redomicile the parent to Delaware.
Series B was led by Atomico in 2016, with participation from Octopus Ventures, Shilling Capital Partners and others.
Only partially. Airbnb dominates short-term (sub-30 day) stays; Uniplaces focuses on mid-term student and young-professional rentals of one to twelve months.
