She stood on Brooklyn sidewalks asking strangers one question: “How do you like living here?” The answers became Openigloo.
Restaurants get rated. Sneakers get rated. Dentists get rated. But the person who holds your security deposit, ignores your busted radiator, and signs off on whether you have a home? For decades, they answered to no one.
Allia Mohamed runs Openigloo, a New York City platform where renters review their buildings and landlords before they sign a lease. Launched in 2020, it has grown from a one-question sidewalk experiment into a leasing marketplace that has helped over 1.5 million New Yorkers vet the people they are about to hand thousands of dollars to. The pitch is almost rude in its simplicity: the landlord has been judging your credit score, your references, your guarantor. Now it is your turn to judge back.
Mohamed is a Canadian-Egyptian New Yorker who took the long way to housing reform. She came up through capital markets on Wall Street and then venture capital, careers built on reading risk in spreadsheets. Openigloo is what happened when she pointed that same instinct at the single most opaque transaction most New Yorkers ever make: finding an apartment.
Today she is the public face of a quietly radical idea - that sunlight is a feature, and that a market gets fairer the moment its worst actors can no longer hide. She has testified at City Council. She has become a reference point for housing reporters. And she still talks about renters the way she did when the company was just her and a notepad: as people who deserved information nobody was willing to give them.
The idea did not arrive in a pitch deck. It arrived in a Brooklyn apartment owned by a landlord Mohamed describes as neglectful, where problems went unsolved and the lease offered no recourse. She figured other tenants in other buildings knew things she wished she had known before moving in. So she went and asked them.
Her first product was not an app. It was Allia Mohamed standing outside apartment buildings, stopping people on their way in and out, asking the most useful question in real estate: how do you like living here? The answers were gold. The problem was that they evaporated the second the conversation ended. Openigloo is, at heart, a machine for making sure those answers never disappear again.
Culture is not something that you can build retroactively.- Allia Mohamed, on building Openigloo from day one
That line is about company culture, but it doubles as a thesis for the whole product. Trust in a rental market is the same way - you cannot bolt it on after the fact. You build it review by review, or you do not build it at all.
Capital markets on Wall Street at Scotiabank and Seven Seas Capital - learning to price risk for a living.
Venture capitalist at Trend Forward Capital, advising global portfolio companies on growth. Meets her future co-founder in grad school at Columbia SIPA.
Launches Openigloo - NYC's tenant review platform - turning sidewalk conversations into a searchable record.
Raises seed funding from backers including Index Ventures and Meetup CEO David Siegel.
Testifies before NYC City Council in support of the FARE Act, which targets tenant-paid broker fees.
Openigloo passes 1.5 million renters helped - and Mohamed is a go-to voice on the state of the NYC rental market.
“How do you like living here?”The four words that started a company
She is easy to file under “ex-banker turned founder.” The label misses the interesting parts.
Long before there was code, there were cold conversations with strangers on the sidewalk. Mohamed believes you cannot understand renters from a dashboard - you understand them by listening, one stoop at a time.
An insight she credits to tenant-rights advocate Georges Clement: anything touching New York real estate is political. Openigloo did not stay neutral - it walked into City Council and took a side.
A trained musician and guitarist, she treats music as therapy and once unplugged with a virtual clay-sculpting class. Curiosity and authenticity, she says, over polished credentials.
Her original market research method was a clipboard and a sidewalk, not a survey tool.
She is a trained singer and guitar player who uses music as a way to decompress.
Canadian-Egyptian by background, she became one of New York's most vocal tenant champions.
She met her Openigloo co-founder in graduate school at Columbia SIPA.
Insider named her one of real estate's top rising stars - in an industry she entered as a frustrated tenant.
She has openly discussed wrestling with imposter syndrome as a founder.
Mohamed's guiding question is almost embarrassingly plain: am I still learning, am I still moving forward? Stagnation, she says, is her signal to change. Applied to Openigloo, the ambition is bigger than a better apartment search. It is a market where transparency is the default and tenants carry leverage they never used to have - across New York first, and the goal is to keep going from there.
For now, the mission is the same as the question she asked on the sidewalk. Make the information renters always deserved impossible to hide.