RunnerA Canadian-founded startup that built a platform for home service professionals to book clients and manage their entire workload around those jobs, has raised another $100 million, equity funding it will use to develop more tools for its users after seeing their ranks double in the last two years to 200,000, with some $13 billion billed and collected through Jobber’s platform in the last year from 27 million households, covering services like HVAC, lawn care, plumbing, residential cleaning, painting, and 50 other categories (also a mark of how fragmented “in-home services” are).
This Series D is led by new sponsor General Atlantic, with participation also from Summit Partners, Version One Ventures and the Tech Pioneers Fund. Summit led the company’s previous round of $60 million in January 2021. As with that latest round, the startup doesn’t disclose its valuation, but co-founder and CEO Sam Pillar noted in an interview that it was “multiple times.” the previous assessment, describing it as a “round of cleanup.”
But as a sign of how Jobber is doing, revenue has tripled in the past two years and is now over $100 million annually, Pillar said. He also noted that the company has been mostly profitable since shortly after its founding; it is not now that it is in growth mode. One other detail: The company is doing well enough that despite the difficulties some startups are having raising money at the moment, Jobber has had a relatively easy sale.
“We wanted to raise new capital for growth, not to keep the lights on,” Pillar said.
Since Jobber has only made about $100 million of $13 billion in gross sales, you can see the momentum the company has to scale. But the market is huge: There are about 6.2 million home services businesses in North America alone, and some $600 billion is spent annually on home services, so the opportunity Jobber and your investors is as clear as a new window pane.
It now has 600 employees and will hire more. He hasn’t laid off anyone in this latest recession. It has raised $176 million to date.
Jobber focuses today on SMEs and sole traders. Pillar says his “sweet spot” is small businesses with fewer than 20 employees, with many of his customers numbering just one or two people, and has users in about 60 markets, albeit the US and Canada. they are by far its largest countries. His premise is that while many of these merchants have managed for generations to run their businesses without any technology at all, mobile phones have opened the door to making their work lives significantly more efficient.
“There haven’t been a lot of technology services for the home service industries, but we still see a lot of technology adoption by those users,” Pillar noted, and the fact that many of them already have these computers in their pockets, and they are using them for so many other services in their lives, it has led home service people to wait and be ready to adopt more tools for their own jobs. At the same time, she added, providing invoices and other tools to the clients of those professionals not only makes the business easier to run, it makes it more professional.
“Consumers expect more technology-enabled experiences, just like they can now order cars, groceries and more using apps,” he said.
The Jobber app covers a wide variety of functions, from billing and payments to booking and managing appointments, as well as some marketing tools for both sending emails and creating and sending quotes, and also a loan function for lines of credit for its users Billing remains one of the largest and most popular uses, Pillar said. Billing is integrated with accounting platforms made by third parties.
Going forward, Jobber wants to incorporate more technology tools to lead users to new ways of interacting with the app and expand their business. This potentially includes more video integrations for remote assessments, although some of this can already be done using, say, FaceTime or other chat apps, as well as what appears to be more analytics.
“We want to understand the health of our clients,” Pillar said, “how many jobs they get, what are the values of those, how many listings convert to jobs. Are they charging more but doing less? One area he doesn’t want to play around with is discoverability: Platforms like Google Maps, Yelp or HomeAdvisor, he said, are doing enough here, and he doesn’t want to pit customers against each other in a race to the bottom for his customers. .
The company has seen a surge in usage in particular in recent years due to some of the big trends that have emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic. Consumers began spending more time in their homes, whether they’ve just moved into new homes or are fixing up existing ones, and that brought more attention to what needed fixing or cleaning, as well as more wear and tear in those settings. All this has translated into a solid portfolio of clients and activity, and now into investment.
“We believe Jobber is bringing much-needed innovation to the small business segment, a category that has traditionally been underserved by technology solutions and is still in the early stages of digital adoption,” said Aaron Goldman, MD and Principal of enterprise technology investments for General Atlantic, in a statement. “With a platform designed specifically for the home services category, Jobber has the opportunity to continue to deepen its value as the platform of choice for its clients. We are pleased to partner with Sam and the Jobber leadership team as they focus on strategic growth and continued product expansion.” Goldman has joined Jobber’s board with this round.