Cityspade is a company founded by three NYU students in February 2014. NYU New York seniors Hao Zhang and Alex Wang created the company, which was later joined in Manhattan, New York by NYU Abu Dhabi senior Weichen Zhu, who spoke to The Gazelle.

The company’s website uses algorithms to search through property rental listings taken from a U.S. database.

“It’s a very intelligent system because you can say, ok, I want to live in New York, I want to live in the Union Square area but I don’t know which street I want to live on. I don’t want to search for every single real estate agent and search for their deals, I want to see everything. So I just enter Union Square and we spit out the best results, the best deals … We rank everything based on transportations, facilities, price, everything,” said Zhu.

As of now the website has listings in Boston, Philadelphia and New York and the company is expanding to Los Angeles and San Francisco. Zhu mentioned that the company hopes to scale the business to a national level within the U.S..

According to a recent article in The National, the startup was granted $200,000 of seed funding at a valuation of $1.6 million.

“It was explosive … In two-three months we had about 2000, sometimes 3000 unique visitors a day,” said Zhu, optimistic that the growth was likely to continue. “In the future, we never know how much potential there is going to be … maybe it’s going to be the Yelp for real estate, maybe it’s going to be a platform where people can get information about all kind of neighbourhoods.”

The company currently runs at a loss but Zhu spoke of two main channels the company could generate revenue through once a stable user base has been established.

“First of all we can generate it from targeted advertising, second of all we can generate it from, let’s say transactions, if you find an apartment through our website with a real estate agent, maybe there can be a commission,” he said.

Balancing a full study load with the stress of running a company now worth millions hasn’t been easy for the trio. Zhu spoke of the need to stay up late to communicate with designers and programmers based in China.

“I think it’s tough — we just have to give up a lot of leisure time, a lot of time to sleep,” said Zhu.

Zhu was positive of the support the university indirectly gave such as access to to professors who gave advice on the internet, technicalities and other matters.