We built it for ourselves first.
Built by a real estate photographer and a software engineer, for agents, photographers, and editors.
Origin
Mattias started shooting real estate in 2017 and founded his own studio in 2021. The studio scaled fast, and the bottleneck became obvious: bookings in email and spreadsheets, editors across three time zones, deliveries via file-transfer services, revisions in chat threads, billing in yet another tool.
Mattias met Fredrik at a photography exhibition in Zimbabwe. Talk turned to the platform Mattias wished existed, a problem Fredrik had been thinking about from the technical side for a while. By the time they were back in Sweden having dinner, the plan was mutual.
Zappwise is what happened next.
“The work that paid the bills kept getting buried under the work of running the business.”
Co-founders
Two people from opposite sides of the same problem.
Mattias Holmgren Co-founder
Mattias has spent the last nine years living every step of the listing workflow: capture, edit, deliver, revise, bill. He runs one of Stockholm's largest real estate photography studios, shooting roughly a third of the city's home listings. He got into the work through his now-wife Michaela, then an agent in training and today running her own brokerage, which has given him a front-row seat to the agent's side of the table for as long as he's worked behind the lens. He discovered he was good at it, then decided to be the best at it. Zappwise started as the platform he wanted for his own studio.
Fredrik Arnell Co-founder
Fredrik is a software engineer and has been a serious photographer since the film era. The workflow problem Mattias described in Zimbabwe was one he had already been thinking about from the technical side. He has a sharp eye for design and works as well with people as with systems. He builds Zappwise; the studio proves it.
Built on our own studio
Every feature in Zappwise gets pressure-tested on real listings before it ships. Our studio shoots, edits, and delivers thousands of properties a year, and we are customer zero. If it breaks at scale, we feel it first. If it saves an hour, we keep it. If it doesn't, it's gone by Friday.
The team spans Sweden, Vietnam, India, and the Philippines, working across the same time zones our customers do.
That's the difference between software written from a meeting room and software written from a working studio.
What we believe
Good enough isn't good enough.
If we're not trying to be the best at this, there's no point being in it. We measure, we iterate, we ship, and we don't fake outcomes.
Respect the craft.
Real estate professionals take pride in their work. Our tools should honor that, not cut corners.
No shortcuts.
Hard work is the only path. The platform is built one careful feature at a time, with the people who'll actually use it.
