Din Bisevac: The Wunderkind Now Building a PropTech Juggernaut

In 2007, now Buena CEO, Din Bisevac was an early content creator on YouTube. His channel gained popularity through clever riffs on other creators’ videos. He then started marketing a clothing line to his audience, working with factories in Turkey, Portugal, and Germany to produce two collections a year and sell them through a Shopify store. From his home in southern Germany, the venture generated more than $30,000 in annual revenue.

He was 9.

It was the beginning of an unconventional career, even by precocious tech wunderkind standards. A few years later, Bisevac used what he had learned from building his online storefront to help companies design websites. That led to interest from a web design firm in Berlin, which offered him a weekend and after-school job. But Bisevac, then in 7th grade, wanted to work fulltime. He managed to convince the company, his parents, and eventually his school principal to let him stop attending school in favor of passing exams and learning through real-world experience.

Transforming Buena into the property management innovator it is today

After half a decade in web design, he joined Buena as a product designer, back when the company was still struggling to find its footing. Over the next several years, Buena burned through $14 million and cycled through multiple business models before landing on one that would define its future: Acquiring traditional property management firms and using AI agents to automate their services.

As a key architect of that strategy, Bisevac stepped into the CEO role and led a period of rapid growth. Today, after more than 25 acquisitions, the Berlin-based company manages roughly 80,000 property units across Germany.

In this conversation, which is part of our series on European startups, Bisevac talks about why he wants property managers to be highly paid, Buena’s future ambition to make home ownership easy and more accessible, and how Europe’s tech ecosystem is finally getting stronger.

You were driven at an incredibly early age. Where does your ambition come from?

Din Bisevac: Honestly, money was definitely a motivation. My parents immigrated to Germany from Bosnia and Serbia, and my father built a construction business that eventually became very successful. Growing up, we were relatively well off. We did all the fancy vacations in the south of France.

Then things started to unravel with my father’s business. Almost overnight, we went from the good life to living off social welfare in a small apartment in a not-so-great area. When you’ve had money and lost it, you always want it back.

I was also bullied a lot in kindergarten because I didn’t speak German. We lived in a small village, and I was the obvious outsider. Part of me wanted to prove what I was capable of. And the last part is that building a company lets you do a lot of cool things, whether it’s in design, product, or marketing.

What was the original business model for Buena, and how did you land on a property management model that worked?

DB: At first, the company was called Home, and the first iteration sold property management software to owners. That was very hard to sell. Then we built a product for homeowners to manage properties themselves. That didn’t work great either. After that, we tried leasing apartments below market rates and renting them out for a profit. Through all of this, we burned through $14 million and were weeks away from bankruptcy.

I had the idea to go back to property management for owners — but as a tech-enabled service, combined with acquiring existing property management companies. In Germany, the market is extremely fragmented. There are many small property management firms with long-standing customer relationships, but there’s huge room for improvement. The industry has a terrible reputation and some of the lowest customer NPS scores. People often hate their property managers, and property managers deal with a lot of frustration every day.

One of the original founders wanted to leave, and the other decided I should run the company. We recapitalized so I was incentivized like a founder, and we said, “Well, this will either work, or it won’t.”

Seems like Buena is working well so far. Why do you think that is?

DB: When we buy these companies, we’re not firing people. We use technology to make them exponentially more efficient by automating large parts of their work. So, instead of managing 200 apartments, one person can manage 2,000.

That makes the business far more profitable — you generate much more revenue per employee. It also allows us to pay property managers higher salaries, which motivates the teams we acquire. Many property managers have worked in the industry for years with no opportunity for real career progression. Now they’re told their salary can rise significantly and that there are bigger roles if they’re ambitious.

It’s incredibly rewarding to give people opportunities they never had before. If we succeed, property management could become one of the best-paid and most respected jobs in Germany.

And from the tenant point of view, they’re getting better communication, 24/7 responses, and total transparency into payments or what’s happening with problems or repairs.

Has there been any friction with a tech startup buying so many traditional firms?

DB: There's skepticism at first. Many of the owners are in their 50s, and suddenly they’re being managed by people in their 20s. But they give us a chance to prove ourselves. Once they see the vision is real, they don’t want to leave. It’s powerful to see generations working together. You don’t get that in a lot of tech startups.

How much of the workflow can you automate with Buena?

DB: Property management is a lot of communication and accounting, which is exactly what AI models are good at. They’re continuing to improve but they’re already really good. You just have to be smart about how to build products on top of them.

For example, our internal Turing Test was: Can an AI agent manage flooding or water damage in an apartment? We built one and were surprised at how well it performed. The agent gathered all the needed information, dispatched plumbers and contractors via email, and went back and forth communicating with everyone. We haven’t rolled this out yet across the entire portfolio because we want to make sure it's excellent before deploying to 80,000 units.

Looking ahead 5 to 10 years, what does success look like for Buena?

DB: Property management is just the first step. Our ultimate goal is to become a one-stop-shop for anyone who wants to buy an investment home. We will help you find a property that’s a great investment for you, finance it, help you find insurance for it, and manage it for you.

We already hold large balances from tenant deposits and maintenance reserves and we have operational data on properties and tenants that will allow us to do mortgage underwriting better than a traditional bank. And because we manage so many properties, we can help people find properties that are not otherwise on the market.

Germany is an ideal place to start. It’s the world’s third-largest economy, yet it has one of the lowest home-ownership rates among developed countries. There's a real need to make home ownership more accessible.

Our next market is the US, where property managers face similar reputational challenges, and where tech adoption will likely be even faster.

You’ve talked about strengthening Europe’s tech ecosystem. What needs to change?

DB: One reason Europe hasn’t produced more global tech giants is that founders often seek liquidity too early. They cash out instead of building truly great, enduring companies. You also basically never see them again, and they’re not participating in building the next generation of founders or finding the next big thing.

This is starting to change. Successful founders have become more active in mentoring, angel investing, and opening their networks. That’s the idea behind Project Europe, an early-stage fund I’m a partner in that backs founders under 25. We pair funding with events where we have established founders spend three full days with these young founders, doing mentoring sessions, helping them fundraise and recruit, and really being there for them.

We’re now seeing European companies reach tens of billions in value within just a few years — something the founders of 15 years ago wouldn't have imagined.

Din Bisevac is the CEO of Buena, a Berlin-based company that uses AI to modernize property management. GV led Buena’s Series A financing in 2024 and GV General Partner Vidu Shanmugarajah is on the company’s board. Born in Bosnia, Bisevac joined Buena as a product designer in 2019 and became CEO in 2022, leading a rebrand and turnaround of the business.