A man buys an apartment in Paris, opens the folder from the building's property manager, and understands almost none of it. The charges, the meeting minutes, the invoices for works nobody explained. He is an owner, and he feels like a guest. The story goes that this was how one of Matera's co-founders met the problem, and it became the seed of a company.
The company began as illiCopro, incorporated on 17 January 2017. Raphaël Di Meglio was the chief executive, Victor Prigent ran product, Jérémy Krebs ran technology. Their idea was to let a building's own owners run it, with a cooperative syndic model, and to hire experts for the hard parts such as accounting and law. For owners it promised charges that were 20 to 50 percent lower, a claim the company itself made.
What almost nobody outside the property trade saw coming was the price of a poster.
The early money was small. In January 2019 they raised 1.5 million euros. A year later, in January 2020, they raised ten million from Index Ventures and the Spanish fund Samaipata and changed the name to Matera, after the Italian town of houses carved into rock. The new name was meant to carry them into Spain and Italy. They then had about 800 buildings and 25,000 co-owners on the platform.
What almost nobody outside the property trade saw coming was the price of a poster. In March 2020 Matera ran a campaign that mocked traditional syndics. It worked as marketing and as a provocation. Professionals complained, and trade bodies took the start-up to the Paris commercial court. In January 2022 the court found clear disparagement and ordered 70,000 euros in damages. Two years later the Court of Appeal threw out the claims that Matera was practising the profession illegally or misleading customers, but still convicted it of disparagement, while cutting the bill by 40,000 euros.
Growth kept coming at a cost. Revenue reached 11.5 million euros in 2023 with a loss of 7.7 million, then 15.7 million in 2024 with a loss of 1.16 million, a sharp narrowing in one year. In 2023 and 2024 the company added rental management and a traditional syndic offer, a quiet admission that not every building wants to run itself.
The lesson for a founder is double-edged. Anger at an incumbent can be the best brand you will ever have, and also the most expensive. Matera's founders discovered that you can be right about the model and still pay for the way you said it.