Spleet, a startup that provides rental management solutions for landlords and tenants, removed co-founder and CEO Adetola Adesanmi in March 2024 after an audit of the company’s finances.

Based on that audit, investors alleged Adesanmi misrepresented the company’s financial position, mismanaged and misappropriated $1.5 million, said two people who asked not to be named so they could speak freely. The matter was reported to law enforcement in March, those people said, as the company began recovering funds.

Investors were surprised by Spleet’s decision to lay off employees in February 2024, said one person with direct knowledge of the matter. That person suggested investors were misled about Spleet’s finances in monthly status reports.

“We’re letting go of some team members because when prices went up, landlords began renewing at 0.8 to 2.2x last year’s rent,” Adesanmi told TechCabal in February. “Many of our tenants can’t afford that, and the best way to continue as a business is to lay off people.”

Investors weren’t the only ones the layoffs took by surprise. At least three former employees said they were blindsided by the decision because the company had only concluded a new round of hiring in December 2023.

Co-founded in 2018 by Adetola Adesanmi, Spleet provided an alternative to paying rent annually in Lagos. It connected tenants with properties they could rent monthly but soon found that that business model was difficult to scale.

“Growth was slow on the landlords’ side. We just couldn’t add as many landlords as we wanted to on time,” Adesanmi told TechCabal in 2022. It moved from being a marketplace for landlords and tenants to building infrastructure.

According to Crunchbase, the company raised $260,000 in a family and friends round in 2019. It raised $625,000 in a 2021 pre-seed round from investors like MaC Ventures, Ajim Capital, and Daba Finance and $2.6 million in a 2022 seed round led by MaC Ventures.

Mac Ventures did not immediately respond to a request for comments.

Daniela Ajala, who joined the business as business development lead in 2019 before becoming Chief Operating Officer (COO) in 2020 now leads Spleet and has also been named cofounder.

Adesanmi declined to comment on any part of this story, citing confidential legal processes.

Spleet has remained the last one standing in the early class of proptech startups that sprung up from 2015. Pioneered by Fibre.ng, those startups believed they could disrupt the Lagos real estate market by offering monthly payment options.

Their assumptions soon ran into a hard reality: without fixing the massive housing shortage, landlords—and the agents who play a big role in the rental process—have no incentive to change the model. This left businesses at the mercy of landlords, and many of them soon shut down.

Yet, Spleet outlasted the pack by quickly realising that the juice was not in trying to change the hearts and minds of landlords who saw nothing wrong with the status quo. People close to the company believe this leadership change is just a pebble in the road; for Spleet, the road itself extends ceaselessly into the horizon with promise.

*MaC Ventures is an investor in Big Cabal Media, TechCabal’s parent company.