workera Canadian-founded startup that built a platform for home service professionals to book clients and manage all their workload around those jobs has raised another $100 million in equity which it will use to build more tools for its users after their seen ranks double in the last two years to 200,000, with some $13 billion billed and collected through Jobber’s platform in the past year from over 27 million households, with services such as HVAC, lawn care, plumbing, household cleaning, painting and some 50 other categories (also a sign of how fragmented “home services” are).
This Series D is led by new lender General Atlantic, with participation 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 latest round, the startup is not disclosing its valuation, but co-founder and CEO Sam Pillar noted in an interview that it has “several times” previous rating was, describing it as a “round of cleanup”.
But as a sign of how Jobber is doing, earnings have tripled over the past two years and now exceed $100 million a year, Pillar said. He also noted that the company has been largely profitable since shortly after its inception – it’s not now that it’s in growth mode. One more detail: the company is doing so well that despite the difficulties some startups currently have raising money, Jobber was relatively easy to sell.
“We wanted to raise new capital for growth, not to keep the lights on,” Pillar said.
Considering that Jobber has only made about $100 million from $13 billion in gross sales, you can see the urge for the company to scale. But the market is huge — there are about 6.2 million home service businesses in North America alone, and about $600 billion is spent annually on home services — and so the opportunity Jobber and his investors see is as clear as a new window.
It now has 600 employees and will hire more. It hasn’t fired anyone in this latest recession. It has raised $176 million to date.
Jobber today targets SMBs and sole proprietors — Pillar says its “sweet spot” is small businesses with fewer than 20 employees, with many of its clients just one or two people — and it has users in some 60 markets, though the US and Canada are by far the largest countries. The premise is that while many of these merchants have managed to run their businesses without any technology for generations, mobile phones have opened the door to making their work lives significantly more efficient.
“There aren’t a lot of tech services for the home service industry, but we’re still seeing a lot of technology adoption by those users,” Pillar noted, and the fact that so many of them already have these computers in their pockets, and they’re using them for so many other services in their lives, has led people in home care to expect and be ready for more tools for their own work. At the same time, he added, providing invoices and other tools to those professionals’ clients not only makes the business easier to manage, but also more professional.
“Consumers are expecting more technology-enabled experiences, just as they can now order cars, groceries and more using apps,” he said.
Jobber’s app includes a wide range of features from invoicing 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 credit line lending feature for his users. Billing remains one of the largest and most popular applications, Pillar said. Invoicing integrates with third-party accounting platforms.
Later on, Jobber wants to build in more technology tools to educate users on newer ways to interact with the app and grow their business. This may include more video integrations to conduct remote assessments – although some of this can already be done with FaceTime or other chat apps, for example – as well as what sounds like more analytics.
“We want to understand the health of our customers,” said Pillar, “how many jobs they get, what the values are, how many quotes turn into jobs. Are they charging more, but doing less?” One area it doesn’t want to play in is findability: Platforms like Google Maps, or Yelp, or HomeAdvisor, he said, do 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 an increase in usage in recent years, in particular, due to some of the big trends that emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic. Consumers began to spend more time at home — whether they just moved into a new room or are redecorating existing spaces — and that led to a greater focus on what needed repairing or cleaning, and increased wear and tear on those environments. All of that has led to a strong pipeline of customers and business, and now investments.
“We believe Jobber brings much-needed innovation to the small business segment, a category traditionally underserved by technology solutions and 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 built specifically for the home service category, Jobber has the opportunity to continue to deepen its value as a platform of choice with its customers. We are excited 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.
