Sydney startup UrbanYou acquires HomeHello in bid to become Australia’s top marketplace for on-demand home services

Sydney-based home services marketplace UrbanYou has acquired domestic cleaning startup HomeHello to expand its reach further north in its quest to become Australia’s go-to marketplace for on-demand home services.

UrbanYou offers access to services like home cleaning, gardening, and tradesperson repairs, and the startup will now be absorbing HomeHello’s domestic cleaning services into its platform, also taking its customer base, providers, and intellectual property rights. HomeHello co-founders Richard Lin and Jason Pham will now be working with UrbanYou in advisory roles.

The acquisition, the price of which has not been disclosed, comes three months after UrbanYou raised $1 million to expand its operations nationally, and co-founder Noga Edelstein says the move will allow her startup to “become the biggest on-demand marketplace for home services in Australia”.

“After our raise we had the goal of accelerating growth, and this gave us a great platform to achieve that,” Edelstein tells StartupSmart.

UrbanYou will now be leveraging HomeHello’s existing presence in Queensland to launch its offerings in Brisbane, adding the city to its current presence in Sydney and Melbourne.

Since UrbanYou launched in 2014, Edelstein says the startup has serviced more than 30,000 properties and processed over $4 million in home services transactions through the platform.

While Edelstein declined to disclose specific acquisition figures, she says the acquisition will double UrbanYou’s recurring user base; when Edelstein spoke to StartupSmart UrbanYou had 8000 users. Read more

Angela Castles - Startup Smart - 23 Oct 2017