Jobber, a startup founded out of Canada that’s built a platform for home services professionals to book customers and manage all of their workload around those jobs, has raised another $100 million, equity funding that it will be using to build out 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 via Jobber’s platform in the last year from across 27 million households, covering services like HVAC, lawn care, plumbing, residential cleaning, painting and some 50 other categories (a mark also of how fragmented “home services” is).
This Series D is being led by new backer General Atlantic, with participation also from Summit Partners, Version One Ventures, and Tech Pioneers Fund. Summit led the company’s previous round of $60 million in January 2021. As with that last round, the startup is not disclosing its valuation, but co-founder and CEO Sam Pillar noted in an interview that it was “multiple times” the previous valuation, and described it as a “clean up round.”
But as a sign of how Jobber is doing, revenues are up three-fold in the last two years and are now in excess of $100 million annually, Pillar said. He also noted that the company has been mostly profitable since soon after it was founded — it isn’t now that it is in growth mode. One other detail: the company’s doing well enough that despite the difficulties some startups are having raising money right now, Jobber had a relatively easy sell.
“We wanted to raise new capital for growth, not to keep the lights on,” Pillar said.
Given that Jobber has made only around $100 million from $13 billion in gross sales, you can see the push that the company has to scale. But the market is massive — there are around 6.2 million home service businesses just in North America, and some $600 billion is spent annually on home services — and so the opportunity that Jobber and its investors see is as clear as a new window pane.
It has 600 employees now and will be hiring more. It hasn’t laid off anyone in this latest downturn. It’s raised $176 million to date.
Jobber today focuses on SMBs and sole traders — Pillar says its “sweet spot” is small businesses with fewer than 20 employees, with many of its customers numbering just one or two people — and it has users some 60 markets, although the U.S. and Canada are by far its biggest countries. Its premise is that while a lot of these tradespeople have managed for generations to operate their businesses with absolutely no technology whatsoever, mobile phones have opened the door to making their work lives significantly more efficient.
“There has not been a lot of tech services for the home services industries, but we are still seeing a lot of adoption of technology by those users,” Pillar noted, and the fact that so many of them already have these computers in their pockets, and are using them for so many other services in their lives, has led home services people to expect and be ready to adopt more tools for their own jobs. At the same time, he added, providing invoices and other tools to those pros’ customers not only makes the business easier to manage, but makes it more professional.
“Consumers are expecting more tech-enabled experiences, just as they can now order cars, groceries and more using apps,” he said.
Jobber’s app covers a wide variety of functions, from invoicing and payments through to booking and managing appointments, as well as some marketing tools both for sending out e-mails but also building and sending out quotes, and also a lending feature for credit lines for its users. The billing remains one of the biggest and most popular usages, said Pillar. Billing integrates with accounting platforms made by third parties.
Down the line, Jobber wants to build in more technology tools to bring users along into newer ways of engaging with the app and expanding their businesses. This includes potentially more video integrations to carry out remote assessments — although some of this can already be done using, say, FaceTime or other chatting apps — as well as what sounds like more analytics.
“We want to understand the health of our customers,” said Pillar, “how many jobs they’re getting, what the values are of those, how many quotes turn into jobs. Are they charging more but doing less?” One area it does not want to play is discoverability: platforms like Google Maps, or 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 their customers.
The company has seen a surge of usage in particular in the last couple of years due to some of the big trends that emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic. Consumers started to spend more time in their homes — whether they have just moved into new digs or are sprucing up existing places — and that brought more attention to what needed fixing or cleaning, as well as more wear and tear on those environments. All of that has spelled a strong pipeline of customers and activity, and now investment.
“We believe Jobber is bringing much-needed innovation to the small business segment, a category that has been traditionally underserved by technology solutions and is still in the early stages of digital adoption,” said Aaron Goldman, MD and head of enterprise tech investing for General Atlantic, in a statement. “With a platform that is purpose-built for the home service category, Jobber has an opportunity to continue deepening its value as the platform of choice with its customers. 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.
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