HouseCall Add-On: Mobile-Centric Home Services Startup Raises $6M

Yard-Work-Done-for-Now Home, HouseCall (Flickr creative-commons-by-Farther-Along)

HouseCall, a San Diego mobile software startup that operates a Web-based marketplace for home services, has raised $6 million in a Series A round led by August Capital of Menlo Park, CA.

Two existing investors—Michael Beaudoin, a former co-founder and co-CEO of HomeAdvisor, and San Francisco-based e.ventures, joined the round, according to a recent statement from the company. HouseCall has raised a total of $9 million, including the latest round, since the startup was founded in 2013.

HouseCall maintains a roster of independent businesses offering house cleaning, repairs, and other services, and takes a percentage of each work order that home owners send through its system.

HouseCall’s five founders came together after working for many years on contextual software for smartphones at Qualcomm (NASDAQ: [[ticker:QCOM]]), the San Diego wireless technologies giant. While many rivals also are focused on the $500 billion home services industry, the HouseCall team has taken a mobile-centric approach to serving the market.

“We equip our home services customers with state of the art mobile tools to run their entire operations from a smartphone,” HouseCall CEO Ian Heidt said, according to the statement. “Our platform allows home services companies to grow their business by streamlining hours of time lost to paperwork.”

The company said its online platform and mobile app have been adopted in over 700 cities in the United States and Canada since early 2015, when the startup launched its business throughout the country. HouseCall said it plans to use its additional funding to drive broader adoption by expanding its marketing, sales, and customer service team. In a recent e-mail, HouseCall’s Heidt tells me, “We are staying put in San Diego [and] looking to hire.”

Homeowners can use the mobile app to select the type of service they need and choose a carpenter, plumber, or other skilled worker from listings. Service providers also can download a HouseCall app on their smartphone that includes programs for customer relationship management, scheduling, payment, and billing—enabling them to participate in the HouseCall online marketplace and to manage their business.

Rivals in the crowded home services market include Amazon Home Services, Google, Yelp, Angie’s List, TaskRabbit, ProCom, Zaarly, and others.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.