The home improvement industry is synonymous with manual labour. It’s driven by the individual craftsmanship and manual skills of tradespeople such as plumbers, builders, and electricians.
While the services within the industry generally rely on manual efforts, the operations of the business shouldn’t have to – yet the limited technology available within the industry confines these businesses to a certain threshold of efficiency and scalability.
Business owners face challenges with backlogs, contract management, payments, customer service, among others. We’ve seen technology solve similar, if not identical challenges in other industries, but not this one. The opportunity gap for digitisation is massive, and one that would catapult the speed, scalability, and competitiveness of the average home improvement business.
With that, I am thrilled to announce that The Delta is leading the pre-seed round of handly, the ambitious startup that’s taking on the task to digitise the home improvement industry – led by the ambitious duo, Bastian Mayer and Klaas Krüger.
In 12 months, Bastian and Klaas have launched the first handly product, significantly improving the lead management and job scheduling capabilities of the 300+ businesses on the platform, launched an Innovation Unit to support the discovery and solution design of pain points faced in the industry, and solidified a product roadmap that serves that largest pain point felt by the industry: payments.
We led the €1.5m round via partner Julian Teicke, angel investor and founder of the insurtech wefox. Commenting on the decision to invest, Julian says:
“Back in the day, you used Yellow Pages to find service providers, now you use Google - in the future you will use handly: From finding, to coordinating, to servicing and paying all in a single interface. That is why we invested.”
I share his sentiment.
It’s a startup that made believers out of us fairly quickly, as well as some of Europe’s leading founders and CEOs of unicorn and publicly listed companies, including:
Patrick Andrä, founder of HomeToGo, John Oringer, founder of ShutterStock (IPO) and Pareto VC, Lucas Cranach, founder of OneFootball, Udo Schlömer, founder of Factory Berlin, The Hilti Family, Müller Media, Budde Entertainment, Patrick Hennig, founder and CEO of luca, Sascha Gartenbach, co-founder of luca, and Roland Fassauer, board member at aifinyo.
To learn more about the funding round, visit this article from tech.eu.
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