Steve Melhuish gave himself a deadline that would never appear in a quarterly earnings presentation. By his twins’ fifth birthday, he wanted to be out of PropertyGuru’s day-to-day operations. He had helped build a company around finding people a place to live. Now he wanted more time in his own.
The twins arrived in 2012. Two years later, he realised how much of their early childhood had passed while he was occupied with the business. His response was characteristically organisational: sit down with the board, work out the succession, assemble the people who could carry it through. A family promise became a management project.
There is something revealing about that choice. A founder can enjoy solving problems so much that the company becomes the answer to every question, including how to spend Saturday. Melhuish decided to give another answer a chance. The work of making himself replaceable would eventually create room for a new preoccupation: building businesses that could reduce emissions while earning their customers’ custom.
“Chilling out is hard for me, but I am getting better!”
Steve Melhuish, 2013
The classified problem
Before the succession plan came a less voluntary change of address. In 2006, the Singapore condominium Melhuish was renting went up for sale. He and his wife needed somewhere else to live. He had arrived in the city in 2005, bringing experience in telecommunications and digital businesses rather than any particular expertise in its property market.
Much of the information he needed still lived in newspaper advertisements. A building name and a price could send a searcher off on another round of calls. Photographs, plans and an easy way to compare alternatives were harder to come by. For a decision involving so much money, the process offered remarkably little to look at.
The gap was especially striking to someone familiar with what the internet had already done elsewhere. Established property websites abroad showed that people would search online. Singapore had the connectivity and the demand. The practical question was whether somebody could assemble a useful service around that behaviour locally.
Melhuish and Jani Rautiainen co-founded PropertyGuru in 2007. Their starting point was the consumer’s difficulty in seeing the market clearly. A searchable collection of homes could give buyers and tenants more information, while giving agents somewhere to reach them. The same listing could be useful to both sides, provided the website attracted enough of each.
It was a modestly domestic origin for a regional business. No one had to invent a new human desire. People wanted to find a home and understand what they were being offered. The opportunity lay in making an existing, expensive decision less bewildering. The newspaper, meanwhile, was being asked to surrender a rather comfortable relationship with the property advertisement.
A builder who kept moving
Moving was familiar territory. His father served in the British Army, and his childhood involved changing countries, making friends and starting again. He has described never staying in one country for more than two years while growing up. Adapting to a new setting became part of ordinary life well before it became part of his career.
His first professional decade was spent in corporate roles. At Mercury Communications, later part of Cable & Wireless, he worked around the telecommunications infrastructure that supported the internet boom. Even inside a large organisation, new business units and new markets interested him. The recurring attraction was having something to build.
He also encountered the investment side of digital businesses, helping connect startups and larger companies. Work involving Skype gave him a closer view of an emerging internet company. Business plans, founders and investors offered an education in how differently a small company could move. Corporate bureaucracy had rather less appeal.
Asia supplied another direction. A six-month trip through the region helped turn an interest into an intention. He kept the combination of digital business, startups and Asia in view with a note on his wall. When his wife’s work brought the possibility of Singapore, the geography finally matched the ambition.
His optimism seems to have travelled with him. He credits his parents for teaching him to approach life positively. As a child, his intended career had been policeman, complete with a small plastic British police helmet. Entrepreneurship eventually provided other opportunities to ask questions, although considerably fewer occasions to wear the hat.
Leaving takes a team
PropertyGuru grew beyond its first market. In 2011, it expanded into Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand. Each new country meant building relationships and understanding a different property market. A home search may be a familiar activity everywhere, but the businesses serving it have to earn their place locally.
Growth also changed what leadership required. By the middle of the following decade, Melhuish and Rautiainen were working on a succession plan. Identifying somebody who could lead the next stage became a task in its own right. Keeping the founder permanently at the centre would have been one way to avoid the question. They chose to answer it.
Hari V. Krishnan, previously a senior LinkedIn executive in Asia, joined PropertyGuru as president and chief business officer in January 2016. Other leadership appointments followed. On September 6 that year, Krishnan became CEO and Melhuish became vice chairman, initially continuing full time. The change had a structure around it before it had a public announcement.
The distinction between handing over a title and handing over a working life matters here. By 2018, he was describing a half-time commitment to PropertyGuru. The company’s later disclosure records that he handed over all operational responsibilities that year. His board service continued until January 10, 2024, a much longer tail to the transition.
PropertyGuru continued to have chapters of its own. It listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2022 under his successor’s leadership. In December 2024, EQT completed its acquisition at an equity value of approximately US$1.1 billion, and the shares were delisted. At that point, it connected more than 31 million property seekers with over 50,000 agents each month across four markets.
Those milestones belong to a company and the people running it across many years. For Melhuish, the useful personal development was that the business could keep making news while he directed his attention elsewhere. A founder’s creation had become an organisation with a life beyond its founder’s diary.
The economics of saying yes
In 2018, he joined Wavemaker Partners as a venture partner. The following year, he founded Planet Rise to support companies addressing climate change and social inequality. Its remit brought his operating experience into contact with different kinds of problems: clean energy, water, food waste, and access to economic opportunity.
The portfolio has included Ampd Energy, working on energy systems for construction, and Hydroleap, developing water-treatment technology. Melhuish also became a strategic investor in Eco-Business in 2021, with an appointment to its international advisory board. His work was spreading across both the companies making changes and the networks connecting people interested in them.
He subsequently co-founded Wavemaker Impact, bringing venture building into that climate focus. In a 2023 discussion of the approach, he put customer economics near the centre. People and businesses adopt a solution more readily when it gives them a practical financial benefit. Cleaner technology has to survive the conversation about what the customer can afford.
“This is a green discount.”
Steve Melhuish, 2023
The phrase neatly expresses the proposition. Lower emissions can come with lower costs or better income. A business model can make existing technology easier to buy and use. The work begins with finding the obstacle between a potentially useful solution and a customer who has a reason to take it up.
Target potential over roughly a decade. These figures describe the venture-building ambition, not achieved portfolio results.
The paired numbers supply a demanding filter. The financial opportunity must be large enough to sustain a substantial company, and the emissions opportunity must be large enough to justify concentrating effort there. They also give an experienced founder two questions to ask before committing years to another venture. The targets are ambitious; delivering them remains the work.
London address, Asian unfinished business
Melhuish moved back to Britain at the end of 2023, after roughly two decades in Asia. He is now listed as a London-based founding partner at 100x100, alongside his founding-partner connection to Wavemaker Impact. His work continues to draw on the region where he built PropertyGuru, with its growing demand for energy, infrastructure and better services.
In June 2026, 100x100 announced him as a speaker at Concave during London Climate Action Week, discussing its venture-building approach. In October, he was listed for a London conversation about connecting European and Asian innovation ecosystems. The distance between those markets has become part of his working brief.
He has also been pressing for more women to build and fund climate companies. That broadens the question of where the next ventures will come from. Alongside deciding which problems deserve investment, there is the matter of who gets the chance to work on them, and who sits in the room when money is allocated.
The thread through these chapters is a preference for useful problems. A home search supplied one. Preparing colleagues to run the company supplied another. Climate venture building now supplies plenty more. The difference is that he has already done the difficult work of giving one business enough independence to make room for the next.