Irishman's New York start-up gets US30m

Thursday, June 12 14:36:28

Handybook, a start-up headed by Irish entrepreneur, Oisin Hanrahan, and New Yorker, Umang Dua, has secured USD30m in seed funding.

The company, whose app offers housecleaning and handyman services much the same way the app Hailo quickly provides users with taxis, has now collected USD47m in funding.

Handybook now has 150 employees in 26 cities around the US.

Mr Hanrahan and cofounder Umang Dua plan to use the new cash to expand even faster.

"We're going to enter some new cities, but we'll focus more on the cities we're already in," says Hanrahan. " We're going to keep building the customer service team - it's all about customer experience. We've built quite a good engineering team in New York and will keep growing out the product."

Handybook began at Harvard Business School in 2012, where Hanrahan and Dua met randomly as roommates.

The pair spent their first year kicking around start-up ideas. Inspiration came by the way of their dirty apartment. "We were living in squalor. We had furniture sitting in the apartment for months that we hadn't put together," Hanrahan told me this March. "We thought why don't we start thinking about home services and solving this enormous problem."

They found a few engineers and got busy recruiting freelancers from cleaning services.

Over the summer of 2012 Hanrahan and Dua were had been accepted into Highland Capital's incubator and started building a real business. That business has since expanded to 26 U.S. cities. This winter Handybook bought west coast cleaning business, Exec, for an undisclosed price reported to be under $10 million.

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Irishman's New York start-up gets US30m