Lawn Love, a San Diego Web startup that emerged from the Y Combinator accelerator in August, has raised $1.9 million in seed funding from Launch Capital, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Binary Capital, and other investors.
“We’re bringing software and tech to a traditionally low-tech space,” says Jeremy Yamaguchi, a San Diego entrepreneur who started Lawn Love last year. The company provides an online marketplace for yard services by making it easier for homeowners to go online to book and pay for their lawn and garden services—much like Handy, Homejoy, and Uber do for odd jobs, housecleaning, and car rides.
Lawn Love screens the gardeners, who work as independent contractors, and oversees the business. “We send them work and we pay them to do a job,” says Yamaguchi, a onetime Web developer. He says the company’s Web platform and software technology makes it easier for both customers and service providers to do business.
With a homeowner’s address, for example, Yamaguchi says Lawn Love can use Google Maps to estimate the size of the yard and provide an online quote for mowing the lawn. Yamaguchi says Lawn Love also can make the job easier for service providers by assigning jobs along a route or within a particular neighborhood.
“We’re not solving incredibly difficult technology problems,” Yamaguchi says. “These are business problems.”
After launching Lawn Love last month, Yamaguchi says the startup already has about 11 or 12 employees and is providing lawn services in the South Bay area of Silicon Valley, San Diego, Orange County, and Los Angeles, as well as three Texas cities—Austin, San Antonio, and Dallas.
Before starting Lawn Love last year, Yamaguchi says he sold a previous startup called “Golden Shine” in 2013.
He founded Golden Shine in 2009 as a Web-based referral agency for home and office-cleaning services. Golden Shine’s annual revenue increased by over 358 percent from 2010 to 2012, when the company generated $900,000 in sales. That was fast enough for the San Diego Business Journal to rank Golden Shine as the fifth fastest-growing company in San Diego County in 2013.
Domestic cleaning, though, is an intensely competitive field that includes such companies as Homejoy, Maid Sailors, Direct Cleaners, Cleaning Exec, Planet Maids, Chores, and various other on-demand service startups. With Lawn Love, Yamaguchi is entering a market that is more of a green field.
