Oisin Hanrahan first had the whiff of an idea that would lead to his big startup while living in Budapest in 2005 and searching for someone trustworthy to clean his home and do minor repairs. Then he forgot about it. He moved to Dublin and then London, where he watched the rise of Hailo, a taxi app similar to Uber, and the idea returned to him.
"Then I forgot about it again," Hanrahan recalls.
It wasn't until he moved to Boston to attend Harvard Business School and found himself living with two other students in a messy apartment that he finally pursued the idea: make it easier for people to book housecleanings and repairs online and on relatively short notice.
Hanrahan and one of his roommates, Umang Dua, startedHandybook in 2012 to realize that goal. The online service lets customers book vetted professionals to handle repairs, plumbing, cleaning and electrical jobs at home. The startup, which is based in New York City, now operates in 26 cities.
On Wednesday, Handybook announced raising a $30 million Series B round of funding, led by Revolution Growth, the venture fund started by AOL cofounder Steve Case. The latest round brings Handybook's total funding to date to more than $40 million.
In an interview with Mashable, Hanrahan described the on-demand home services market as one of the "very few trillion-dollar categories left," and said the large funding round was intended to allow Handybook "to be capitalized to go at that opportunity as much as we can."
"The way we set up Handybook is to think about all the services you need inside your home and how we can be a remote control for managing those services," Hanrahan says. To that end, Handybook plans to use the funding to grow its staff of 130, particularly in customer service and mobile engineering.
Beyond that, he says, "it's about delivering more and more liquidity." At the moment, Handybook offers next day availability on three-quarters of services provided in most of the cities it operates in. "We want to pull that up to 100% next day, and then to 100% six-hour availability." And so on.
The startup now does more than 10,000 bookings a week, according to Hanrahan. It reportedly takes a 20% cut for each of those bookings.
Handybook is certainly not without competition. HomeJoy, a similar startup, has raised nearly as much funding to date. What's more, just one day before Handybook announced funding, a report came out saying Amazon may get into the local services marketplace by the end of the year. And then of course there's Angie's List.