Aparta bets home co-ownership unlocks housing; TechCrunch SB200 nod, four Nordic markets

Aparta (formerly HILI) was founded in Norway in 2023 by former bank executive Eilin Schjetne with co-founders Trond Eriksen and Rob Wood. Its premise: traditional housing finance offered only two paths — debt or renting — so the team built a third: professional co-ownership, where a homeowner buys a first home together with an institutional co-owner, or sells a share of their current home to unlock capital without moving.

The company positions itself as infrastructure rather than a brokerage: it builds the technology, legal frameworks and investor relationships to run co-ownership at scale, and offers developers white-label or co-branded sales solutions. In June 2025 HILI rebranded to Aparta and launched a global platform; by then it was established in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Iceland. That same month it partnered with Stefnir, Iceland's largest asset manager, to launch Iceland's first residential co-ownership fund.

In September 2025, Icelandic developer Reir Verk applied Aparta's model to its projects and the company reported significantly higher sales rates across several of them, followed by talks with developers in Oslo, Trondheim, Copenhagen and Stockholm. On 2026-08-25 TechCrunch named Aparta to its Startup Battlefield 200 for Disrupt 2026 — the only Norwegian company and only Nordic fintech on the list — and the company prepared to present its model in San Francisco in October 2026 while expanding toward Finland and further European markets.