One Year In, and No Slowing Down
Fixer announces $4 million Series A Round
Today we announce our $4 million Series A round led by Founder Collective, the top-ranked seed investor (#11) on the Forbes Midas List. Participating investors include Impact Engine, Hyde Park Venture Partners, OATV as well as several private individuals.
Launched in May 2017 by GrubHub founder Mike Evans and several members of the early GrubHub team, Fixer has quickly grown to be the Chicago market leader in providing premier quality, on demand handyman services. Customers book a skilled, experienced Fixer for any kind of home maintenance issue – confirming the hourly rate, estimate, and date + time on mobile in seconds. The Fixer team jumps to action, handling a variety of tasks big or small, often in just one visit.
“Our phones are the remote controls for our lives,“ says Evans, “We can order a car, buy groceries, walk our dog with our phones these days, why not a skilled handyman service?”
Beyond the customer experience, Fixer has a defining mission:
We Fix Things. We Build People.
“We purposefully chartered as a public benefit corporation to increase the number of sustainable career paths for men and women in home repair trades.” Continues Evans, “It’s not enough to just provide a great service or disrupt a traditional industry with technology. We are leaning into a larger societal problem in that we need create skilled people to perform these jobs and with this funding we are uniquely positioned to do it.”
The funds will be used to launch Fixer’s market expansion plans while also establishing its first in-house training school, with a first class set to kick off in September. Jessica Droste Yagan, Managing Partner at Impact Engine believes, “Fixer is enabling upward economic mobility for individuals while also solving a real problem for homeowners and renters. We’re excited about the company’s potential to drive commercial value while improving the community.”
In addition to the current round, the company previously raised $1 million in private seed funding, bringing total capital raised to $5 million since inception.
Eric Paley, Managing Partner at Founder Collective, having led investments in billion-dollar startups, Uber, the Trade Desk, and Cruise, is confident on Fixer’s future growth. “When Grubhub first came onto the scene, using a mobile app to order Chow Mein seemed futuristic. Mike Evans and the Grubhub team made the practice routine and built a multi-billion dollar business. I have no doubt that with Fixer, this team has the blueprint necessary to build a consumer brand that creates trust with homeowners and develops the next generation of skilled tradespeople.”
Here at Fixer HQ, we have learned by leaps and bounds in the last year – listening to our customers, to our employees, and articulating our overall vision. We are more than energetic about taking these next important steps in driving our fresh approach to home repair. Please join us in a big thank you and high five for being a part of our first year, and know that we are going to be pushing even harder to make your home repair “headache free” going forward.