Ekaya,a marketplace for long term rentals with a touch of online dating, like an AirBnb with a little Tinder thrown in for good measure, has launched in private BETA, with early access requests on Ekaya.co .

Founded by Justin R. Melville (CEO), Ruark Ferreira (COO) and Rudolf Vavruch (CTO) and  Mark Heerden who provided their initial seed capital and joined the team as executive chairman & CFO, Ekaya wants to connect property owners and property hunters easily.

The platform connects landlords to good (verified) tenants, providing transparency and control like never before. For tenants, Ekaya is the perfect tool to differentiate themselves in the hyper-competitive rental market and get the place they want.

” The opportunity we’re addressing with Ekaya is massive, totally enormous,” says Justin. “And, unlike a lot of other consumer internet ideas, it’s totally feasible to execute this in South Africa and then expand. The combination of these factors together with our passion to design and build great things come together to inspire us everyday.”

Ekaya tries to determine “good” tenants by using objective data from both financial and social sources to create a weighted rating for our tenants. If that data turns out to prejudice the tenant, that’s likely the result of a poor history/reputation on their part. Justin says there’s little they can do about that except make the information available to the landlord so that they can make an informed decision. On a side note, Ekaya is looking to introduce an education and remediation component in due time so they can help “poor” tenants become “great” tenants over time. A kinda of a cleansing tool.

Justin is not afraid to say this was not they intended to do earlier. They had a clever little show house finder which is now hosted on Eboard.io and the team says it is not in a position to give it a lot of focus at the moment but are proud that it is the first mobile show house finder of it’s kind.

In two years, Ekaya aims to be in the middle of internationalizing and on a mission to turn into a very big business, very quickly.

“Possibly. Where we go will likely be a path of least resistance thing. The opportunity we’re looking at is totally global, there’s isn’t a continent or country that doesn’t present an interesting and lucrative prospect,” Justin told TechMoran.

Ruark and Justin have worked together since 2005 and were last seen (prior to starting Ekaya) trying to bring industrial revolution to the global music industry with Airborne.

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