The amount of money that Khosla Ventures and Pear VC have put into Honey Homes has tripled. Honey Homes provides a specialized assistant to help homeowners manage all of their unexpected tasks. One of the rounds of funding that the company got last June brought in $9 million.
Era Ventures led the company’s most recent funding round, a “up round” of $9.25 million led by CEO and co-founder Vishwas Prabhakara. As of June of last year, PitchBook put its value at $39 million, but the company said that was “not accurate.” Honey Homes has raised a total of $21.35 million in venture capital since it began.
Why did the new round of cash come in? The company added a significant number of new members. Last autumn, the company said it had “well over 1,000 members,” which means it had doubled the number of members in three months. It also brought in 3.6 times more regular revenue per year in 2023. The business wouldn’t give out exact sales numbers, but Prabhakara did say that they planned to “do the same and get to eight figures in ARR” in 2024. (8 figures, of course, means $10 million.)
He also said, “Our team has been going to more than 150 homes every day.”
Vishwas Prabhakara, the first general manager of Yelp, and Avantika Prabhakara, a former marketing head at Opendoor, Trulia, and Zillow, founded Honey Homes in 2021. They are married and have a son. In August of that year, the company started with 10 test users. As a team member, the company hires a helper. The handyman is a paid worker, so people know who will be working in their homes every time.
Honey Homes charges a flat fee to homeowners who use its app for the convenience of a membership-based “end-to-end” service. This fee can be anywhere from $250 to $395 a month, but there are deals that give you a discount if you pay for it all at once.
We match members with a fixed-rate handyman who comes by at least once a month to fix things around the house and perform regular maintenance. In an industry that has traditionally relied on freelancers, they receive perks like family leave and paid time off due to their hiring. On the other hand, someone can choose to try out different companies for variety.
Single-family residents in the San Francisco Bay Area (including the city itself) and a lot of the Dallas-Fort Worth area can now use Honey Homes. It just started up in Los Angeles and is growing there too. There are also plans to grow even more in Texas.
“We’re taking care of five times as many homes as we were a year ago,” Vishwas Prabhakara said.
Vishwas Prabhakara says that even though Honey Homes’ first market was San Francisco earlier this year, it is now its fastest-growing market.
He said, “The city is a different beast than the suburbs.”“ There are questions about parking and crime. There are many things to think about. Now, though, it’s like our main gem and our fastest-growing market.
The company is also adding new features, like AI, that will help its handyman team work more efficiently and do more of the “maintenance needs on autopilot.”
It’s interesting that Honey Homes hired Andrew Ladd, a DoorDash co-founder, to lead product development last year.
Last year, Moore told Eltrys that he thinks Honey Homes is different from many other consumer companies in the home services space that just “serve as a concierge” or match users with possible vendors. Some of the companies that compete with them include Angi, TaskRabbit, and Thumbtack.
Vishwas Prabhakara says the company chose to raise an extension instead of a Series B because it found that it needed less money than it thought to become profitable. (They want to make money in the next couple of years.) Aside from getting money from membership fees, the average homeowner spends more than $750 a year on the service for other services, like buying parts.
Honey Homes now employs 75 people, and its handyman team has grown from 25 to over 50.
Clelia Peters of Era Ventures said she wanted to invest in Honey Homes because “rich homeowners or people who live in condos or apartments with on-site supers have usually been the only ones able to get high-quality home maintenance services provided by a dedicated handyperson.”
She thinks that Honey Homes’ services will be even more in demand in a world where people stay in their homes longer and need to keep them better because of the “lock-in effect” caused by the rise in interest rates.
She also said, “We expect that the push to electrify homes will create a greater demand for reliable advice and installation services, which Honey Homes is well-positioned to provide.”
