Darius Cheung has described himself at 28 as very young and naive. By then he had already done something most founders dream of. His mobile security company, tenCube, had been sold to McAfee for US$25 million.
tenCube began in 2005 with two co-founders, Varun Chatterji and Rishi Israni. Its main product came from a simple pain, when Chatterji lost a phone and the data on it. Cheung, who had studied engineering at the National University of Singapore and taken part in its Overseas Colleges programme, had been interested in building businesses since the early internet boom, when he was about 17 or 18. The three sold when they felt they needed a bigger company behind them to serve the large mobile carriers.
It was Homey, a roommate-matching site he built with Yan Phun and another friend from school.
After the sale he stayed on at McAfee for two years. Then he tried again. He co-founded BillPin, a bill-splitting app. The team shelved it because people simply did not split bills often enough to support a mobile wallet. It was a small defeat after a big win.
What almost nobody remembers is what 99.co started as. It was Homey, a roommate-matching site he built with Yan Phun and another friend from school. Only when the team looked closely at how renting and buying worked did they see how broken the property market was, and they turned Homey into a portal. The company launched as 99.co in 2014 with seed money of about US$560,000, then got US$1.6 million from Sequoia and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin.
The early money brought its own trouble. Cheung has said easy funding created pressure to grow faster than the team was ready for. The company then had to win over property agents who did not trust a new site, and to rebuild its product for Indonesia, where he has called the experience a rude shock.
It worked anyway. In 2019 a US$15.2 million Series B, led by Allianz X and MindWorks Venture, funded expansion. Between early 2019 and 2022, sales grew more than eightfold. Traffic reached 30 million a month, and a US$52 million Series C pushed total funding past US$80 million.
Cheung now invests in other founders, including Carousell and Glints, and says the people and the culture matter more than the product. A man who had already sold a company, and failed with another, built his best-known one out of a roommate app that few people remember.