home services

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ServiceTitan acquires Aspire to move into landscaping, raises $200M at a $9.5B valuation

With a lot of us spending more time at home these days, home improvement has continued to be a booming market. Now, one of the big players in that space — ServiceTitan, which builds software that today is used by over 100,000 contractors to manage their work — is getting a little bigger.

The company — which also works with contractors that work on business properties — is acquiring Aspire Software, a software provider specifically for commercial landscapers. Along with that, ServiceTitan is announcing another $200 million in funding, a Series G that values that company at $9.5 billion.

The funding is being led by a new backer, Thoma Bravo, with other unnamed existing investors participating. (That list includes Sequoia, Tiger Global, Dragoneer, T. Rowe Price, Battery Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners and ICONIQ Capital.)

Los Angeles-based ServiceTitan is not disclosing the financial terms of the deal, but it comes on the heels of the company raising $500 million only in March (when it was valued at $8.3 billion) — money that it earmarked at the time for acquisitions.

ServiceTitan also confirmed that this is its biggest acquisition yet, which roughly puts this deal in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Aspire will stay based in Missouri to build out the company further from there.

Aspire itself has some 50,000 users and sees $4 billion in annualized transactions on its platform across areas like landscaping, snow and ice management, and construction. It has never disclosed a valuation, nor how much money it has raised. The St Louis, MO company was previously backed by growth equity firm Mainsail Partners.

The deal underscores not just how much scale and opportunity remains in building technology to serve the home services space, but also what might be a consolidating trend within that, where a smaller number of companies are building technology for contractors and others in the space working across a number of adjacent and related verticals.

ServiceTitan is already bringing in annual recurring revenues of $250 million — a figure it shared in March and hasn’t updated — and as of that month, it had grown 50% over the preceding year. Part of that growth is based on simply more usage of and demand for its software, but part of it also has to do with the company expanding what it covers.

ServiceTitan got its start in residential plumbing, HVAC and electrical — the areas where the the two founders Ara Mahdessian (CEO) and Vahe Kuzoyan (president) went first because they knew them best from their own family businesses — but expanded into areas like garage door, chimney and other areas, as well as commercial property, on its own steam.

In other markets like landscaping or pest control, the expertise is more specialized, however, so it makes sense to make acquisitions in those areas to bring in that software, and teams to manage and build it, to further diversify the company. (ServicePro, a pest control company, was acquired in February.)

ServiceTitan said that its contractor customers have made more than $20 billion in transactions in the last year, but with the wider industry of contracting repair and maintenance services estimated to be worth $1 trillion, there is obviously a lot more potential. Hence expanding the range of areas covered in the industry.

“Both Aspire and ServiceTitan were born out of a desire to improve the lives of contractors who work tirelessly to serve their communities, but who have historically been underserved by technology,” said Mahdessian in a statement. “Mark and his team at Aspire have more than 500 years of combined experience in the commercial landscaping industry. Just like we built ServiceTitan to solve the problems our fathers faced, it’s that first-hand industry knowledge that has enabled Aspire to build the most powerful software in the industry with the highest customer satisfaction.”

Thoma Bravo has been making some prolific moves to take majority positions in a number of older tech companies in recent weeks (see QAD, Proofpoint and Talend for three examples among others). This, however, is a growth investment that is coming as many wonder when and if ServiceTitan might go public.

I’ll hopefully get a chance to ask Mahdessian about that later but in March he hinted that an IPO might come later this year or latest by the end of 2022, depending on market conditions. This Series G round implies perhaps stretching to the later part of that timeframe.

“As the fastest-growing software solution for the trades with an unrelenting focus on customer success, ServiceTitan is poised to extend its leadership and capture increased market share as the industry exceeds $1 trillion globally,” said Robert (Tre) Sayle, a partner at Thoma Bravo, in a statement. “ServiceTitan’s expansion into landscaping, a more than $100 billion market in the US alone, is an important step on its path to provide all home and commercial tradesmen with the tools they need to grow and manage a successful business. We are excited to partner with ServiceTitan and to leverage our software and operational expertise to accelerate the company’s growth and build upon its strong momentum.”

There are a number of companies playing in the wider home services market that speak to the opportunity ahead. Companies like Thumbtack are digging deeper into home management, providing a bridge to contractors to fill out the work needed (and also providing them with the software to do so), while companies like Jobber and BigChange, which have also raised recently, are also looking to build better software to manage individual and fleets of contractors and their fleets.

ServiceTitan, the biggest of the software players now, is likely going to continue making more deals to grow its own empire, but it added that it will also be using the funding to expand more organically, with investments into customer service, R&D, and to hire more people across the board.

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With a team that helped build the brain behind Alexa, HomeX raises $90M

HomeX, a home services platform for homeowners and service providers, has raised $90 million in a funding round led by New Mountain Capital.

New Mountain Capital, a New York-based investment firm with more than $30 billion in assets under management, was the only institutional investor to put money in this round alongside company executives. The company was bootstrapped until a 2019 $50 million-plus debt financing.

Founded in 2017, Chicago-based HomeX aims to “radically improve” home services by pairing service workers with homeowners, both virtually and in person. It also has built software, and offers services for, contractors that are aimed at helping them drive and manage demand “more efficiently.”

Notably, one of the company’s co-founders, CTO Simon Weaver, and several team members were on the development team of Evi, a startup that had built an AI program that can be communicated with using natural language via an app, that was acquired by Amazon in 2012. That technology was essentially the brain behind Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa. 

HomeX uses artificial intelligence to diagnose home issues virtually before a contractor even goes out to a home, with the goal of helping them resolve a problem faster (by having the necessary equipment ahead of time for example), which in turn makes customers happier. 

“We’re using machine-generated content to create solutions that are specific to a homeowner’s issues,” said  co-founder and president Vincent Payen. “Using machines to understand symptoms, the questions to ask and to actually get to a diagnosis and a recommendation or resolution is where AI absolutely shines and allows us to do things that were not possible even three or five years ago.”

Founder and CEO Michael Werner worked in the $500 billion services industry for years (his family founded Werner Ladders) and recognized just how fragmented it was. He also acknowledges that, especially in certain markets, “there’s a terrible imbalance between very high demand and not enough contractors to do the work, or rather, a terrible labor shortage.”

HomeX Remote Assist in particular virtually connects homeowners (via phone, video or chat) with HomeX’s licensed technicians to diagnose and repair common home issues. That business unit has experienced more than 400% growth in less than a year, according to Werner. Last year, the company grew by “about 5x” the number of contractors on its platform. It declined to reveal revenue figures.

Image courtesy of HomeX

“For homeowners, we’re making home maintenance less complicated,” Werner said. “At the same time, we want to help the contractor succeed. Similar to how telemedicine has changed how medicine is delivered, HomeX Remote Assist is going to change the service experience for taking care of your home.”

Another area of HomeX’s business that is growing rapidly is its B2B offering. Home warranty and insurance companies see remote services “as very additive to make their business more efficient,” notes Payen.

“We are using some of our capital toward a pilot program and a number of business development opportunities there,” he said.

For now, while the company is not profitable overall, it is profitable in the services side of its business, according to Werner. In the last 12 months alone, it has served “hundreds of thousands” of clients via its platform, defined by unique virtual and physical appointments.  

New Mountain Capital Managing Director Harris Kealey said his firm viewed HomeX as a business that is primed to reshape the home and commercial services industry.

“The market is massive and the need for change and innovation is substantial,” he said in a written statement.

Another company in the space, Thumbtack, recently expanded into video home checkups. Thumbtack, a marketplace where you can hire local professionals for home improvement and other services such as repairs, in December acquired Setter, a startup which provided its customers with video home checkups conducted by experts, and then offered personalized plans for how to address any issues.

Thumbtack had laid off 250 employees at the end of March 2020, after the company saw big declines in its major markets. Since then, however, CEO Marco Zappacosta told TechCrunch there’s been “a renewed focus on the home and an acceleration of digital adoption.”

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ServiceTitan raises $165M for its home services software, now valued at $1.65B

ServiceTitan, a startup out of Glendale, Calif. that has built a software platform for home services businesses — in areas like air conditioning, plumbing and electrical repairs — to manage their work, has raised $165 million in what it claims is the “largest software raise in Southern California history.”

(That distinction might be specifically for B2B software, since Snap, as one example, raised billions before it went public, when it was still known as the app startup Snapchat.)

The company has confirmed that its valuation is now at $1.65 billion — making it the newest unicorn out of the region (and fulfilling a prediction we made earlier this year).

This latest round, a Series D, was led by Index Ventures. New backers Dragoneer and T. Rowe Price also participated, along with existing investors Battery Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners and ICONIQ Capital.

It’s coming just seven months after ServiceTitan raised its last round: rapid funding rounds of large sums of money, raised within months of each other, seems to be a trend at the moment, underscoring the current state of the market where VCs have themselves raised huge funds and are looking for safe harbors and fast-growing companies in which to invest them. (As two examples, just earlier today, UiPath announced another huge round, its third fundraising this year; and Nikola Trucking also raised its second round of the year.)

The funding will be used for bringing on more talent — it’s already hired from Google, Netflix, Adobe and Accel — as well as business development and to build more software to fill out a vision of becoming “the operating system for home services.” It’s also been making acquisitions, and this could help with that, too.

This is potentially a huge market, with some $400 billion spent on home service repairs annually in the U.S. alone.

ServiceTitan was co-founded by two Armenian Americans, Ara Mahdessian and Vahe Kuzoyan, in 2012, after they met on a ski trip organized by the Armenian student associations at Stanford and the University of Southern California when they were still were in college. The startup was borne out of work both were doing after college to build software to help their fathers, who worked in air conditioning contracting, run their businesses. 

Small businesses often are some of the most overlooked when it comes to tech innovations, even more so when they come from relatively unsexy industries like air conditioning repair, but they need solutions as much as larger organizations. ServiceTitan’s rise has come from filling that gap in the market.

It says it is on track to double subscription revenues this year, with some 2,500 customers on board covering some 50,000 technicians and $10 billion of services in areas like plumbing, air conditioning, electrical and garage door repair, working out to nearly 20 percent of homes across the U.S. and Canada.

“The ServiceTitan mission has always been personal to us,” said Mahdessian, co-founder and CEO of ServiceTitan, in a statement. “Our software powers the tireless men and women of home services who ensure the world has the basic necessities of life: running water, relief from the scorching heat and biting cold, power and electricity, and more. We take it for granted today, until our toilets back up, our air conditioning goes out during the heat of summer, or our lights go out in the middle of the night. These are the heroes that come to our rescue, and we’re here to help them be more efficient and successful.”

ServiceTitan is not the only company eyeing up the space, of course: aggregators like Amazon and Angi Homeservices (formerly Angie’s List) are providing a way for independent contractors and small franchises to connect with customers, and they will inevitably also look to provide the accounting and other software to help these companies run their businesses in their two-sided marketplaces.

ServiceTitan believes it has an edge. “Our software helps our customers with nearly every workflow in their business, including CRM, scheduling, dispatch, mobile invoicing, payments, inventory, and more,” said Kuzoyan, co-founder and president of ServiceTitan, in a statement. “We’re now integrating with large partners to enable the future of home services, including real-time appointment booking integrations with partners like Yelp and others, as well as supply-chain integration with partners like Lennox and others.”

With this round, Index’s Nina Achadjian is joining the board. “Ara and Vahe started ServiceTitan because they wanted to solve the pain point they felt firsthand running their fathers’ businesses,” she said. “Since then, the company has revolutionized how plumbers, electricians, air conditioning technicians and thousands of others in other trades run their businesses. The best part is that ServiceTitan is just getting started. We could not be more excited to be a part of their journey to transform the $400 billion home services market.”

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The Happy Home Company shuts down, team members move to Google

Happy Home Company The Happy Home Company is the latest home services startup to call it quits. The company was founded by Doug Ludlow, who sold his previous startup, Hipster, to AOL (which also owns TechCrunch). Its goal was to take some of the confusion out of the home maintenance process — when something broke in your home, Happy Home’s “home managers” would help you find the right… Read More

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