Handy co-founder, Oisin Hanrahan, speaking at Web Summit 2014. Image via Web Summit
There was some Irish entrepreneurial success this morning as the home-help app Handy’s founder, Oisin Hanrahan, announced the company has received $50m in Series C funding.
The Handy service, which offers an on-demand home-cleaning service online, has proven to be a runaway success since it launched in 2012 from its base in New York having been founded by Hanrahan along with Umang Dua, Ignacio Leonhardt and Weina Scott.
Last month, the company said it had surpassed the 1m bookings mark across its bases in the US, UK and Canada where 10,000 home help contractors have offered their services through Handy.
And now, speaking at the Web Summit, Hanrahan confirmed that it had raised $50m in funding to begin the process of rolling out its service to a total of 28 countries worldwide by the end of 2016.
Its most recent funding round saw it raise $15m back in March when it also announced Tumblr’s former head of engineering Kenneth Little would be its new CTO.
Hanrahan has said that the funding will help it expand its range of services to include handyman services and vacation rental, similar to Airbnb.
Speaking on Handy’s blog, Hanrahan and Dua said of the successful funding round: “When we started three years ago, the home services market was inefficient and broken. With well over 1m bookings completed through the platform, we have shown the need for a seamless, reliable and convenient on-demand alternative.
“With this recent funding round, we will continue to increase our presence in each of our cities, offer more home services and improve the platform to continue to deliver the experience that the hundreds of thousands of people using the platform have come to expect of us.”
The bulk of the funding, Handy said, was provided by Fidelity, which joins TPG Growth, General Catalyst, Highland Capital and Revolution Growth as investors in the company.
This brings the total funding raised by Handy to-date to $111m with a company valuation of $500m.
Updated 9.17am, 4 November 2015: This article was updated as TPG Growth had incorrectly been referred to as TPG Ventures.
