Homejoy Raises $38M As It Looks To Expand Beyond Home Cleaning

Homejoy, a startup that makes it easy and relatively affordable ($20 an hour) to sign up for a home cleaning, is announcing that it has raised $38 million in new funding.

The money was actually raised across two rounds &#8212 a Series A led by Google Ventures and a Series B led by Redpoint Ventures. The rounds were raised within “a couple months of each other,” said co-founder and CEO Adora Cheung, which is why they’re being announced at the same time.

Max Levchin, First Round Capital, Oliver Jung, and Mike Hirshland (most of whom had invested previously) also participated. Altogether, Homejoy says it has now raised a total of $40 million.

The Y Combinator-incubated startup first launched its service under the name Pathjoy last year. It says it’s now available in 30 markets in the United States and Canada and employs more than 100 people who work with “thousands of professional service providers” (i.e., cleaners). Cheung told me that the company’s revenue and other metrics have been growing by double digits every month.

Homejoy also recently established a foundation to support veterans and military families in need.

Moving forward, Cheung said her biggest worry is “scaling with quality”: “It’s great to grow fast, but you also want to grow fast and maintain that quality.” (For what it’s worth, I’ve been a pretty regular Homejoy customer since I first wrote about the company, and I’m usually happy with the service &#8212 my only complaint has been the fact that the wait for a cleaning can sometimes be several weeks.) Behind the scenes, the company says it has built a fairly sophisticated technical infrastructure to manage its workforce.

Beyond funding overall growth, Cheung said the money could also help Homejoy expand into areas beyond cleaning that are also related to home services and tie into the company’s goal of “making happier homes.”

“We’re definitely thinking about it,” she said. “Honestly, there’s no timeline for us right now. We don’t have any hard set dates, but you’ll see something in 2014.”

It’s interesting to compare Homejoy, which has been focused on cleaning since its public launch, with more generalized on-demand task services like Exec and TaskRabbit. Exec has since shut down its errand service to focus on cleaning (and lowered its prices as well) while TaskRabbit also “realigned” (with some layoffs) to focus on its enterprise and mobile offerings.

via TechCrunch » Startups http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/05/homejoy-38-m/