Adelaide-founded, San Francisco-based SaaS startup HappyCo, whose suite of products helps businesses better manage their operations, has announced the closing of a US$7.5 million (around $9.8 million) Series A funding round, coming from 500 Startups, Point Nine, Flight Ventures, and AngelList’s SaaS Syndicate.
Cofounder and CEO Jindou Lee said the funding, which brings the total raised by the startup to date to over US$11 million, will go towards expanding the startup’s engineering and sales teams; HappyCo currently has 34 employees across its Adelaide and San Francisco offices.
He said the startup will also look to grow its customer base, with plans to enter into new verticals.
“We’ve spent the last five years building and refining our platform to replace manual operational processes with real-time auditing and business intelligence tools that empower companies to dramatically improve their key performance indicators,” Lee said.
“This round of funding validates our business model and technology, and it will allow us to scale our business to help more organizations succeed in today’s competitive data-driven economy.”
HappyCo was founded in 2011 as Happy Landlord, a system helping property managers and landlords better manage their properties. With these users typically needing to inspect their properties on a regular basis, the volume of paper forms that need to be filled out and filed after each inspection can add up, and as such Happy Landlord turned Happy Inspector looked to replace them through an app, also allowing users to take and incorporate photos.
Joining Sydney accelerator Startmate in 2012 and taking part in the 500 Startups program the same year, the Happy Inspector system has since expanded to facilitate various types of formerly paper-based inspections, audits, and checklists, its software targeting all kinds of companies with operation teams who rely on paper forms.
Now HappyCo, the startup has three products, Happy Manage, Happy Inspector, and business intelligence solution Happy BI. The startup works with over 8,000 clients across the real estate and hospitality industries, also working with retail businesses, airports, and franchises, among others.
Counting the likes of Marriott International and Westfield among its client base, HappyCo has facilitated over 1.3 million inspections over the last five years, with users taking more than 20 million inspection photos.
Nathan Creswell, a partner at Flight Ventures and cofounder of the SaaS Syndicate, said the startup is one of the most exciting real estate SaaS success stories he has seen.
“The company not only has best-in-breed mobile apps, but its ease of deployment and high user adoption levels have made it the platform of choice for forward-thinking enterprises globally. Their model also has significant value in many verticals beyond real estate, and we are proud to be able to fuel HappyCo’s continued growth,” Creswell said.
Image: Jindou Lee. Source: HappyCo.
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