In 2006 the condo Steve Melhuish was renting in Singapore went up for sale. He had been in the country about eighteen months, and he knew almost nothing about its property market. Finding a new home meant newspaper classifieds and agents who each held a slice of the picture.
He was 47 by the time he told this story to Malay Mail, and he was blunt about it. Many people think you have to be passionate to start a business, he said. He was clueless.
He kept expanding anyway: Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, then fifteen mobile apps.
What he did have was a plan, and an introduction. An investor friend who had heard the plan said he knew someone at INSEAD with a similar idea: Jani Rautiainen, a Finnish entrepreneur already chewing on the same problem. The two teamed up. Their first company carried a dull name, AllProperty Media Pte Ltd, registered in Singapore. The brand people would remember, PropertyGuru, came with the 2007 launch.
The early years were a fight against copycats. Property portals are easy to imagine and hard to keep alive, and Melhuish later said the company's growth came from paranoia, because so many rivals had appeared and vanished. He kept expanding anyway: Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, then fifteen mobile apps.
Then came the money. In 2016 PropertyGuru raised S$175 million from investors including TPG Capital and Emtek Group, which that year was the second-largest raise by a Southeast Asian tech firm. That same year it agreed to buy Ensign Media, its biggest deal yet. By then the site held about 90 percent of the Singapore market and drew 14 million visitors a month.
A quieter story ran alongside. In early 2015, a man named Hari Krishnan, LinkedIn's first employee in Asia, used PropertyGuru to find his own apartment in Singapore. He had known Melhuish and Rautiainen for years, and he called himself a happy user. He joined as president and chief business officer that November and eventually ran the company as CEO. Rautiainen left the board in 2019.
The company listed on the NYSE in March 2022, then went the other way: in August 2024 EQT agreed to take it private in an all-cash deal valuing it at about US$1.1 billion, completed by December. Krishnan left in mid-2025, and Lewis Ng took over.
The lesson sits in the origin. Neither founder started with a calling. One started with a rental that was about to be sold, the other with a half-formed idea he was lucky enough to compare against someone else's. Irritation, plus the right introduction, built a market leader.