Home maintenance platform Dobby secures $1.7 million

Dobby , an AI-powered home maintenance platform, announced it has raised $1.7 million in a Seed round led by Dundee VC with B5 Capital, the family office of Mark Bailey, founder/ partner at DFJ Growth; Jeremy Achin, co-founder/CEO at DataRobot; Maury Devine, a board member at ConocoPhillips and early investor in Sweetgreen; and Andrew Macdonald, head of Uber Mobility as other major participants.

“During my days at DataRobot, I saw an opportunity to build an AI-first company from the ground up in a large and unsexy industry. I chose home maintenance because this $400B industry has not had a tech makeover for more than a decade and suffers terribly low NPS across the board. Dobby’s AI-first design enables us to become embedded in the homeownership journey, help homeowners increase the property value, and yes, make home maintenance fun.” – Dobby’s CEO and co-founder Satadru Sangupta.

An AI-first design has helped Dobby increase operational efficiencies, lower costs, and flip the business model in the home maintenance industry. Existing maintenance marketplaces squeeze profit margins from service providers by selling them leads and creating artificial competition. Dobby only takes commissions when the job is completed. With this new funding, Dobby will continue expanding operations in this region and building the playbook for geographic expansion by mid 2021.

“We don’t pay for ads on Dobby. The chat-bot makes it super easy to communicate virtually and minimize the number of visits. And we get paid within 24 hours. This is game-changing.” –  Zela from LMK Plumbing, a family-owned small business in Maryland.

“I have seen incumbents and startups trying to solve the home maintenance problem, but I haven’t seen the product-led vision that Dobby is executing on. The current market is a lead-generation business. Dobby is a value-creation business. From job specification to payment, Dobby automates home maintenance with a fully-digital AI-powered app.” – Partner at Dundee VC and Dobby board member, Ron Watson.