Fairfax-backed tradie marketplace Oneflare has acquired Sydney-based UrbanYou, a platform facilitating the booking of home services such as cleaning and gardening on-demand.
The terms of the deal were not disclosed, however UrbanYou cofounders Noga Edelstein and Elke Keeley and their team will all join Oneflare and continue to operate UrbanYou.
According to Oneflare CEO Billy Tucker, the acquisition will see the company leverage UrbanYou’s on-demand capabilities for its own customers.
“Most often customers will come to Oneflare and get quotes from great businesses. Increasingly though, they are asking us to do more, to pick the provider, manage payments and coordinate appointments – that makes sense given we are all about helping them get their to-do list done,” Tucker said.
“From here we expect this full-service model will become vitally important. This is where UrbanYou comes in, providing Oneflare with the new capabilities to tap into this huge growth area.”
Tucker added that UrbanYou’s strong brand and the team behind it was also appealing.
“Through this acquisition we get UrbanYou’s great brand, a strong customer base and a range of services; it also has a proven team, which is the best in the industry. We are very excited about drawing on their insights while we help the company expand beyond the existing services and geographies they cover,” he said.
For UrbanYou, the deal follows its raising of $1 million last July and its acquisition of competitor HomeHello last October.
It also launched into Brisbane and Melbourne in the second half of 2017 and expanded into the business-to-business market, offering services to real estate and property managers, and to corporates through employee benefits programs.
The startup said at the time at the time of its acquisition of HomeHello that it had served over 30,000 bookings and generated $4 million in sales through its platform since its launch as UrbanSource in 2014, with 60 percent of revenue coming from repeat customers.
Edelstein said the business now has 70 percent of its revenue coming from repeat customers, with UrbanYou seeing it “as an almost SaaS-like revenue stream”, while activity in Brisbane and Melbourne accounts for a quarter of its revenue.
Its B2B arm, meanwhile, came to account for 15 percent of the business’s revenue within six months, Edelstein added.
With all that growth, Edelstein and Keeley said the opportunity to join up with Oneflare and accelerate the business was too good to pass up.
“When they approached us earlier this year, we saw this was an opportunity to really achieve scale very quickly and to really step up and become the market leader in Australia,” Edelstein said.
“Oneflare [also] brings an incredible, world class research and development team. Their dev capabilities are exceptional, and we’re super excited to fast-track our product development.”
Image: Elke Keeley, Billy Tucker, Noga Edelstein. Source: Supplied.
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