When Meng Chen took up real estate investing as a side hustle, it was important to him to efficiently manage his Milwaukee-area properties so he could focus on his full-time job at GE Healthcare. So he built a tool to help him do just that.
Fast forward five years and Chen has built out the tool he initially created for himself and launched a startup called PortfolioBay to market it to other individual real estate investors.
Chen is among the latest Milwaukee-area startup founders to win a $10,000 grant through the MKE Tech Hub Coalition's FOR-M startup incubator program. To date, more than 200 entrepreneurs have participated in the program and 24 — including Chen and three other recent winners — have received grants, according to the MKE Tech Hub Coalition.
PortfolioBay is currently live with a few initial users and has early revenue, Chen said. The founder plans to use the FOR-M money to build a referral program to help build the company's customer base.
Chen is also a real estate agent with the brokerage firm Compass, where he represents other real estate investors as they buy and sell properties. That endeavor is complementary to PortfolioBay as it allows Chen to get the product in front of other real estate investors, he said. He's working with other Compass agents to develop a "scalable and repeatable partnership" to help agents bring value to their clients and to provide a customer acquisition funnel for PortfolioBay, he said.
Chen, who lives and owns rental properties in West Allis, participated in the FOR-M program in the fall of 2022, after he decided to build PortfolioBay. He left his job at GE Healthcare at the end of 2022 to focus on the startup full-time.
In addition to Chen, the other recent FOR-M grant winners were Adam Franzen of Aire, which is developing automated software for property management; Mitchelle Lyle of International Travel Assistance, which helps remote workers and students with the logistics of living abroad; and Elzie Flenard III of Podcast Town, a podcast production agency.
