A DULOCH teen has had 200-plus investors give more than £470,000 to support his business.

Jamie Stewart, 19, launched his enterprise just over a year ago with the idea of helping students find appropriate accommodation while they were away studying and it's safe to say it's going well.

Last year, Jamie, who dropped out of college to pursue this, was a finalist for Young Entrepreneur of the Year in Scotland at the Great British Entrepreneur Awards and now, just six months later, he has raised a whopping £470,807.55 for his Student Rents company through investment.

He told the Press: "Last month, we launched on CrowdCube and we managed to raise over £470,000 between 213 investors. It's basically just a crowdfund where anybody can put money in and we're just short of half a million basically.

"It's quite surreal actually, that 213 separate individuals see and share the vision I have and see that the work that me and the team are putting in is going somewhere. It's good to see that it's not just me that sees the vision and the future of the company."

Jamie and his team are planning to use the money to increase their brand awareness, improve their marketing and to take Student Rents to the next level.

He continued: "The main plan is to innovate the UK market and change the way that students are currently finding their accommodation for university. Once we've established ourselves in the UK market, we'll head abroad and go to Canada, America and Australia because there's a big market over there as well.

"They pretty much face the same issues over there and I know the issues over here are just getting worse, as you've probably seen in the news recently – there's been a shortage of student accommodation and students are struggling to find accommodation."

Student Rents have plans to set up their app this year and this is something that their new influx of investment will help with.

"In the future, we're going to have an app as well. We have many things in the plans in terms of making things easier for students; one of the main things we're going to be working on for the app is a Tinder-style set-up for the accommodation," he added.

Students looking for flatmates will be able to create their very own profile for other students to match with and Jamie thinks that this would help prevent flatmates falling out, a common problem for those in a flat share!

While it's been a successful year, Jamie credits his team as the key to his success. He added: "They can actually challenge themselves because it's not going to be easy joining a start-up company, and you've got a lot more challenges and risks that you need to take when you join a smaller company compared to a competitor or a bigger company than we are currently.

"It's more rewarding for them and for myself, I think, because they can see the growth, they can see the success. I couldn't have had any of the success that we've had without the people that work with us."