WASHINGTON, Dec. 3, 2020– Dobby, an AI-powered home maintenance platform raises $1.7 million in the seed round of funding.
The capital will use to strengthen the company’s growth initiatives, and spotlight its proprietary, automated, AI-first experience to homeowners, service providers, and ancillary beneficiaries such as real estate agents.
This equity finance raise comes as Dobby scales to meet strong demand in the home maintenance sector, which, according to a Bank of America spending report, is seeing home maintenance consumer spending 60% above the Jan-2020 level.
“During my days at DataRobot, I saw an opportunity to build an AI-first company from the ground up in a large and unsexy industry,” said Satadru Sangupta, Dobby’s CEO and co-founder. “I chose home maintenance because this $400B industry has not had a tech makeover for more than a decade and suffers terribly low NPS across the board. Dobby’s AI-first design enables us to become embedded in the homeownership journey, help homeowners increase the property value, and yes, make home maintenance fun.”
An AI-first design has also helped Dobby increase operational efficiencies, lower costs, and flip the business model in the home maintenance industry. Existing maintenance marketplaces squeeze profit margins from service providers by selling them leads and creating artificial competition. Dobby only takes commissions when the job is completed.
“We don’t pay for ads on Dobby. The chat-bot makes it super easy to communicate virtually and minimize the number of visits. And we get paid within 24 hours,” said Zela from LMK Plumbing, a family-owned small business in Maryland. “This is game-changing.”
Dobby has been enjoying double-digit monthly growth in the DC metro area. With this new funding, Dobby will continue expanding operations in this region and building the playbook for geographic expansion by mid 2021.