Oneflare buys on-demand services platform UrbanYou

Online tradie marketplace acquires on-demand services platform, UrbanYou.

Online tradie marketplace Oneflare has acquired on-demand household services platform UrbanYou.

Co-founded by ex-Yahoo executives Noga Edelstein and Elke Keeley in 2014, the UrbanYou platform enables real-time booking and payments of household services including cleaning, gardening and carpet cleaning.

Oneflare has more than 1 million users visiting the site monthly and more than 100,000 registered businesses, while UrbanYou has experienced rapid growth delivering more than 40,000 services across Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

UrbanYou entered the Brisbane market in October 2017 following its acquisition of rival domestic cleaning start-up, HomeHello.

The online platform also extended its consumer offering to a range of B2B customers last year across the real estate and property management sectors, and corporates as an Employee Benefit.

Noga Edelstein, co-founder of UrbanYou said the deal cements UrbanYou as the dominant player in Australia for on-demand.

“Following our acquisition of HomeHello last year, UrbanYou has taken the lead in consolidating the on-demand market and our merger with Oneflare catapults our growth to immediate national scale,” Edelstein said.

“One of the key ingredients to a successful marketplace is recurring usage, and this is where UrbanYou really excels. Each month 70 per cent of our bookings are from recurring users, providing a growing SAAS-like revenue stream. We credit this to our laser-focus on delivering a high-quality curated service experience to time-poor Australians,” said Edelstein.

Billy Tucker, CEO of Oneflare, said UrbanYou will provide Oneflare with the new on-demand capabilities and expand its services.

“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; from here we expect this full service model will become vitally important. This is where UrbanYou comes in, providing Oneflare with the new capabilities to tap into this huge growth area,” said Tucker.

“What UrbanYou has achieved in a relatively short period of time is incredible. They have made simple what is otherwise a very complicated task, to find a top grade service provider that you can trust with home cleaning, gardening and the like.

“Through this acquisition we get UrbanYou’s great brand, a strong customer base and a range of services, it also has a proven team, which is the best in the industry. We are very excited about drawing on their insights while we help the company expand beyond the existing services and geographies they cover”, concludes Tucker.

In the merged business, Edelstein and Keeley will continue leading UrbanYou, and will explore further on-demand opportunities across both companies.

“In an increasingly connected world, Aussies are used to getting a high quality of service from trusted, already vetted service professionals, at the click of a button. Yet, many small businesses and independent contractors don’t have the funds, or the technology, to provide the seamless on-demand experience now expected by a busy, time poor population,” said Edelstein.

“Combining with Oneflare enables us to expand our services to help support more of these businesses across multiple household verticals, and connect them with customers across Australia. We are already leveraging Oneflare’s world-class R&D capabilities to enhance the UrbanYou on-demand platform, and together we’ll continue to innovate and develop new, convenient services for both consumers and small businesses.”

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