Oneflare acquires TidyMe to continue building out on-demand offering

Fairfax-backed Oneflare is continuing to consolidate the home services market, acquiring on-demand cleaning services marketplace TidyMe.

The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. However, TidyMe will continue to operate independently of Oneflare, with founder Stacey Jacobs to remain.

Billy Tucker, CEO of Oneflare, said he excited to leverage the knowledge and “recurring attributes” of TidyMe to boost the direct relationship Oneflare has with customers.

“TidyMe has built a standout brand that’s well known for quality, which is reflected in impressive consumer ratings. Their focus on excellence is incredible and you can see that through the number of customers subscribed to a week in week out cleaning service,” he said.

In turn, Tucker said, Oneflare will “provide rocket fuel” to TidyMe.

“Oneflare’s market leading search optimisation, plus the millions of users already visiting our platform each month offers a huge boost to TidyMe’s customer acquisition efforts, which in turn gives Oneflare a valuable source of recurring revenue; it’s a massive win-win,” he said.

Founded in 2014, TidyMe connects customers to cleaners for home and office cleaning services; the startup offers home cleaning around Sydney, and office cleaning services across Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, and Perth. It raised $750,000 in funding from Airtree Ventures in 2015.

Jacobs said the acquisition has come at the best possible time for TidyMe, which is looking to scale rapidly across Australia.

“As one of the fastest growing marketplaces for services, connecting millions of Aussies to businesses all over the country, Oneflare was the perfect fit. Oneflare will continue to support our expectation for quality, and provide even more opportunities for our trusted network of service providers wanting to grow their business,” Jacobs said.

This is the latest acquisition for the Fairfax-backed Oneflare: the company last year acquired HomeHello, and bought UrbanYou this past July.

With Oneflare originally launched to connect consumers to trusted experts and businesses to get quotes on services, Tucker explained upon the acquisition of UrbanYou that its customers were increasingly looking for on-demand capabilities.

“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,” he said.

Oneflare expects the full-service model to become “vitally important”, Tucker said, which is where the likes of UrbanYou and TidyMe come in.

Image: Stacey Jacobs and Billy Tucker. Source: Supplied.