If you own your own home or rent an apartment, it’s inevitable that something will stop working. Drains get clogged, the dryer stops drying clothes, or something is in dire need of a fresh coat of paint. But in a time where seemingly everything is available on demand through a mobile interface, scheduling someone to come to your house to fix something has remained remarkably manual.
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Fixer is a Chicago-based company that aims to change this dynamic. It’s a problem Fixer’s cofounder, Mike Evans, is familiar with. Evans was a cofounder of GrubHub, the popular takeout ordering company. If using your phone to order a soup and sandwich for delivery was doable years ago, a similar interaction model could be applied to home repair services.
Today, the company announced that it has closed a $4 million Series A round led by Founder Collective, a seed-stage venture fund based in Boston. Other investors, including Impact Engine, Hyde Park Venture Partners, O’Reilley AlphaTech Ventures, and Mike Evans himself, participated in the round. Prior to its Series A round, the company raised $1 million in private funding. The announcement today brings the company’s total capital raised to $5 million.
Fixer gives its users the ability to schedule repairs at a locked-in price through its website and a mobile application. The company has built a network of qualified women and men it appropriately calls Fixers to conduct home repairs. And although the company currently serves only the Chicago market, the company has raised fresh capital to expand its business and grow the pie for its service providers.
Fixer plans to use part of the fresh capital to kickstart its expansion beyond the Chicago market, but much of the rest will go toward launching an in-house trade school, with the first crop of students starting this September.
“We purposefully chartered as a public benefit corporation to increase the number of sustainable career paths for men and women in home repair trades,” said Evans in a statement. “We are leaning into a larger societal problem in that we need create skilled people to perform these jobs and with this funding we are uniquely positioned to do it.”
By providing both a path to sustainable, rewarding careers, and a platform for tradespeople to connect with jobs to be done, Evans, the rest of the Fixer team, and the company’s new investors hope this combination will build a successful business and fix a looming jobs crisis in the trades.
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