Sakan
Carasant Venture — 2025–2026 · Pilot
MY ROLE
Founder & Engineer — product thesis, payments architecture, full build
STACK
TIMELINE & STATUS
2025 – present, live pilot
OVERVIEW
Sakan is a property management SaaS I engineered to solve the grind every Kenyan landlord and property manager knows: who paid, who's late, chase them, match the M-Pesa statement to the unit. It's piloting on real residential buildings, running real rent cycles with real tenants.
The product thesis was simple: if the platform doesn't automate the money itself — collection, matching, chasing — it isn't worth switching for.
HIGHLIGHTS AT A GLANCE
Automating the money itself — M-Pesa collection, auto-reconciliation, and arrears chasing — battle-tested on live buildings.
THE CHALLENGE
Most property managers in Kenya run their portfolios on Excel sheets and M-Pesa statements. Payments arrive from numbers that don't match tenant records, partial payments muddy the ledger, arrears go unnoticed until they're months deep, and reconciliation eats days every month.
Existing tools are mostly pretty ledgers — they record the problem without solving it. There is no shared system of record for landlords, agents, and tenants built for how this market actually pays: mobile-money first.
MY APPROACH
I refused to build another CRM-with-a-ledger. The M-Pesa layer came first, battle-tested on live buildings, deliberately stressing the ugly edge cases: partial payments, tenants paying from a different number, mid-month move-ins.
The architecture is role-aware from the ground up — landlords, agents, and tenants each land in the right portal, with data isolation enforced at the database layer.
WHAT I BUILT
0.1
Automated rent collection
M-Pesa STK push — tenants pay in two taps, inside the platform, not as a screenshot of a payment sent elsewhere.
0.2
Auto-reconciliation
Incoming payments matched to units and tenants automatically, killing the monthly statement-matching ritual.
0.3
Arrears tracking & automated reminders
Automated WhatsApp communication chases late payers so managers don't have to.
0.4
Portfolio dashboards
Units, tenants, leases, collection rates, and outstanding balances — building health at a glance, on any phone.
OUTCOMES
Piloting on real residential buildings, processing real rent cycles end-to-end.
Payment flow hardened against the real-world edge cases most PropTech tools ignore.
Multi-tenant, role-based architecture ready to scale beyond the pilot.