Housejoy raises Rs 150 crore funding led by Amazon, aims to reach 50,000 service providers

Housejoy, an online home services provider, has raised Rs 150 crores in Series B round of funding. The round was led by Amazon and included new investors Vertex Ventures, Qualcomm and Ru-Net Technology Partners. Existing investors Matrix Partners India also participated in this new round.

Housejoy was founded in January 2015 by Sunil Goel and Arjun Kumar, both veterans in the services industry. From their initial run rate of 40-50 jobs a day in their early days they had scaled to about 4,000 jobs a day across 10 cities, when YourStory spoke to Housejoy in November. The company also recently brought on board Saran Chatterjee, ex VP- Products at Flipkart, as their CEO.Commenting on the fund raise, Saran said,

This is a significant milestone for Housejoy in its journey. This round is a great validation of our growth, team strength and ability to execute in these short nine months. We will build out our team aggressively and are open to partner with companies in the ecosystem to deliver customer delight.

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Housejoy provides a variety of services ranging from maintenance and home repairs to plumbing, electrical services, home cleaning, computer repairs, laundry and dry cleaning. It also offers specialised services in beauty and in-house bridal make-up and are expanding their service portfolio. They had earlier told YourStory that they plan to enter the field of home-based automobile servicing and repairing in the future. Earlier this year, the company had raised $4 million in a Series A round from Matrix Partners.

In July 2014, Amazon had announced an India specific fund of $2 billion to counter Flipkart’s 1 billion fund raise. In July 2015, Amazon along with others had invested Rs 375 crore in BankBazaar.com. Talking about their most recent investment, Amit Agarwal, VP and Country Manager at Amazon India, said,

Housejoy seeks to provide customers with a differentiated experience in shopping for home services. This aligns with our mission in India—to transform the way India buys and sells.

Housejoy claims to have partnered with more than 10,000 service providers across 11 cities on its platform, and has also expanded to Chandigarh this month. Sunil, Co-founder of Housejoy, said, “Our new investment partners open up many new possibilities for market expansion, introduction to new partnerships and best practices in running a sustainable business. We look forward to the next stage of growth.”

Sector overview and future plans

The online local services industry has seen hyper expansion and has an estimated market size of about $50 billion. Vikram Vaidyanathan, MD of Matrix India, believes that the home services economy is set to inflect this year and believes that Housejoy will be able to capitalise on the same. He says,

Housejoy has established itself as an early leader in a hyper-competitive landscape by owning the end-to-end customer experience.

UrbanClap which recently raised $25 million Series B funding from Bessemer, SAIF, and Accel Partners and also got the backing of Ratan Tata, is Housejoy’s most prominent competitor. Doormint, LocalOye, Zimmber,Taskbob, UrbanPro, TimeSaverz, Mr. Right, and TheMakeoverz are some of the other startups that have come up in this category. LocalOye raised $5 million from Tiger Global and Lightspeed Venture Partners in April, while Taskbob, which recently acquired Zepper, raised $1.2 million funding from Orios, Mayfield and others.

Housejoy will utilise the funds to grow and innovate the category with better enhanced technology to help solve deep operational issues; strategic acquisitions, partnerships and to build their team. The company aims to be present in more than 10 cities and have 50,000 service providers on the platform to serve 100,000 jobs per day.

YourStory take

Despite raising about $39 million in funding, US based HomeJoy shut shop earlier this year as they were unable to maintain their workforce and generate profits. Questions were then raised about the future of on-demand home services but Indian startups have so far been able to sustain their growth and raise further rounds of funding. With the backing of Amazon and a consortium of investors, Housejoy is in a great position to take on competition.

Website: Housejoy 

(Disclaimer: Qualcomm Ventures and Ratan Tata are investors in YourStory)