Series B funding announcement: From stealth to transforming the home services industry

Back in April, we announced that Jobox raised $42M in Series B funding. This is a major milestone for our company and one that we have been working towards for the last four years. But it’s also so much more. It’s the beginning of something that will have a significant impact on the lives of pros around the U.S. and the world.

Growing a small business is hard work. My mother would know. She’s been running a restaurant for over 20 years, and to this day, she doesn’t know how to expand it. For instance, she doesn’t know how to do marketing online. And if you ask her what the cost of a dish is, she wouldn’t know. That’s because she spends most of the time doing the actual work of running her restaurant.

This is true of any small business offering services of some kind. But as more and more business moves online, competition becomes fierce. Plumbers, carpet cleaners, and locksmiths all need to modernize their business to stay competitive. They need to accept credit card payments and new payment methods like Apple Pay. They need to offer seamless experiences where customers can see their ETA and get online receipts. They need to make their pricing competitive, and to do so, they need to know the cost of their operations so they can still make a living. It’s complicated, and not what they signed up for.

Meanwhile, consumers are looking for these home service professionals where they are not: on the internet. Most skilled trade pros still work with pen and paper, but consumers turn to Google and online websites to find them. And sometimes, these websites don’t know how to connect the right pro to their customers.

So in 2016, when my locksmith friend Moshe came to me with the idea of building an infrastructure to power the home service industry, I jumped in. I took a plane to Miami from San Francisco, and followed him all day, to understand how software could help him earn more. Our third co-founder Kaushik joined and we first built a mobile-based operating system for home service pros. We wanted to give them the ability to manage their whole business on their phone. Then we added a marketplace infrastructure to help them find jobs. We created an algorithm that would find them jobs that matched their skill set, location, and schedule. And we gave it all for free. But this was only the beginning of the adventure. ?