Leading Craftwork’s Seed Round to Build the Beloved Consumer Brand in Home Services

Meet Craftwork: a new company building the first iconic consumer brand in home services through a trusted, reliable, tech-enabled source for home repairs, starting with house painting — while also reshaping the SMB sector in this space to be more equitable and lucrative for its many hardworking craftspeople. In the words of Tim Griffin, Craftwork’s CEO: “We believe this is a rare opportunity to build something massive, not just to build a national brand in home services, but also to provide good paying, stable jobs and to erase the stigma associated with the trades and to give folks an opportunity for upward mobility.”

When we first learned of Craftwork, we were taken by the freakishly effective, scrappy team: Craftwork has quickly scaled to significant revenue growth in just a few months of operating in only one market, and it wasn’t the founders’ first rodeos — Tim took this last company from $1m to $150m in revenue in just 18 months.

Today, we pleased to share that we led the $6m seed round for Craftwork, joined by General Catalyst, Y Combinator, a16z General Partner Jeff Jordan and DoorDash Co-founder Evan Moore.

We could have made the investment solely on the basis of flawless execution and full-category ambition, but it helped that Craftwork sits squarely at the intersection of several themes we’re tracking closely at Forerunner:

Massive “real-world” industries where there’s meaningful opportunity for reinvention:

Home services is a $500B industry that’s hardly seen any change since it shifted from the Yellow Pages to marketplace aggregators in the 2000s. And today, consumers have no where to reliably turn when trying to do a home upgrade — pricing (and quality of service) are all over the map. Get three quotes online for a paint job; the spread and opacity of what you get back are mind boggling.

It’s easy to think that with all the tech advancements over the past 10-20 years, most opportunities for modernization have been claimed, but we still see plenty of space in big, unsexy industries that have been overlooked due to historical fragmentation or misconceptions. It’s this thesis that led us to invest in Fora, a company reinventing the composition of the travel agency, and Atticus, the largest public-interest legal services provider for consumers.

Digitally-Native Franchises:

While Craftwork has grown through an owned-and-operated model to date, there’s a big opportunity for scale through franchising where top quality, local home services businesses join Craftwork to modernize their operations, offer customers a sleek tech-enabled experience, and benefit from Craftwork’s brand halo that drives marketing and growth. Overall, we see Digitally-Native Franchises as a highly compelling new model for entrepreneurship, where local SMBs thrive as a part of a larger platform with proven playbooks, operational and marketing support, and significantly more opportunity for value accrual than going at it on their own.

Consumers’ reorientation towards core life foundations, focusing on stability and pragmatism:

The home services space is seeing unique tailwinds: after years of so much time at home through the pandemic, consumers have refreshed, dedicated passion for renovating their living spaces and living more quiet, settled lives — a trend that’s persisted even since things “returned to normal” (The Economist calls this the age of the hermit consumer). This is all part of a larger trend where we’re seeing consumers craving more simple, pure ways of living, investing in stronger core life fundamentals amid a time of so much social, political and economic upheaval. One might argue that a weakened macro would be a major drag on home services, but with mortgage rates untenable for so many would-be homebuyers, consumers are instead upgrading the spaces they have.

Read more on Craftwork’s seed funding in Forbes and be sure to keep an eye out for those Craftwork-branded vans (and jumpsuits) when they come to your market.