How LaDepozit raised €1.5M from private investors in 9 months

LaDepozit is a self-storage operator in Bucharest, Romania. It runs 8 locations in and around the city, with more than 1,000 containers and roughly 1,700 rentable units, serving over 1,700 customers. Last year the business did around €1.5 million in recurring revenue with a team of 10 people.

The containers are not off-the-shelf. LaDepozit designed its own, has them manufactured in China, and rolls them onto a site gradually as demand appears. A standard site is about 3,000 sqm and takes roughly 100 containers at full build-out, but it only needs 30 rented to break even. The same containers are now sold to storage operators in other countries that are not direct competitors.

Both founders come from tech — DevOps and software — which is why the company treats storage as an infrastructure problem rather than a real estate one.

The Challenge

Raising money for a physical, container-by-container business is not a two-week seed sprint. George ran a 9-month campaign with private investors, and that timeline created its own problems.

1. A long process with a moving document set — Site economics, occupancy and the build-out plan changed over nine months. Every update meant re-sending files if the documents lived in email.
2. Private investors, not a fund process — Individuals came in at different times and different stages of conviction. Not everyone should see the same folder on day one.
3. Real numbers leaving the company — Site-level P&Ls, container costs and occupancy data are the whole business. Those cannot sit in an open link indefinitely.
4. A team of ten — Nobody at LaDepozit had spare hours for document logistics.

The Solution

One data room instead of an email thread

LaDepozit put the deck, the model, the site economics and the build-out plan into a single Papermark data room. Updating a document meant replacing it once. Every investor link kept working and always pointed at the current version, which matters far more over nine months than over nine days.

Access that matched where each investor was

Prospective investors, investors in diligence and committed investors did not need the same folders. Granular permissions let George open more of the room as conversations progressed, and close access when they did not.

Paying for the hosted product after trying self-hosted

Papermark is open source, and LaDepozit started there — running the self-hosted version themselves. It did not stick.

It's worth paying for good data room and not have the headache.

— George Catinean, Co-founder, LaDepozit

Two engineers running a storage company decided that maintaining their own document infrastructure was not the thing to spend evenings on. They moved to the paid product and have been on it since early last year.

The room stayed open after the round closed

The data room did not get archived when the money landed. LaDepozit now uses it as an investor data room for ongoing reporting — earnings calls, financial updates and the numbers investors expect between rounds. The room that closed the raise is the room that services it.

What comes next

LaDepozit is splitting into roughly five separate companies by the end of the year, one per vertical: real estate for the locations, software, IoT and hardware for the smart locks and access control, operations, and so on.

The reason is valuation. Bundled together, the whole business gets priced on real estate multiples — around 10x net income. Software and hardware command higher multiples on their own. Splitting the entities means each one can be financed, valued and sold independently.

That restructuring comes with its own fundraising. The IoT and hardware line is next up for a round, and it will run on Papermark again.

The Results

• €1.5M raised from private investors over a 9-month campaign
• 8 locations, 1,000+ containers and ~1,700 units financed and built out
• ~€1.5M recurring revenue with a team of 10
• One data room reused for the raise and for ongoing investor reporting
• Break-even at 30 rented containers per site, so capital converts to cash flow early

Use Case

Fundraising and investor reporting — LaDepozit used a Papermark data room to run a long private round, then kept the same room as its investor reporting hub.

Document Types Shared

• Pitch deck
• Financial model and site-level economics
• Occupancy and build-out plan
• Investor updates and earnings call materials

Conclusion

A nine-month raise is a different problem from a two-week one. The documents change, the investor list is staggered, and the process outlives any single version of the deck. LaDepozit closed €1.5 million by running that process out of one data room that stayed current the whole way through — and then kept using it.