Continuing the trend of acquiring smaller rivals for consolidation and thus making its second such move in that direction within a month, Housejoy, the Amazon India backed home services startup has announced acquisition of Orobind, a startup which provides on-demand fitness trainers at home.
The acquisition, which is an all-equity deal, will give Housejoy the trainers of Orobind, the customer base and the technology along with the entire team. It will help company inorganically expand into a new domain, without having to build an entire team around — precisely what acquisitions are supposed to do.
Commenting about the acquisition, Satya Vyas, co-founder of Orobind, said,
Being entrepreneurs, it is a proud moment for us that we built a tech company from scratch and took it to a level where a larger and reputed player like Housejoy could come and find value in it.
Orobind is a mobile application which acts as your personal fitness coach. The company had raised a pre-series A round of funding from a group of new and existing investors. It had not revealed the financial details or the name of the participating investors.
It assigns experts based on the location of user, preferred workout time and workout days. You can make the booking from within the app and get started. Once the booking is confirmed, the expert visits you at your place and start your training sessions.
The company was founded in December 2014 by Satya Vyas and Shubhanshu Shrivastava. What sets Orobind apart is the fact that it offers police verified, curated experts who have undergone stringent background checks. Currently, Orobind is available in 30 communities in Bangalore and has recently launched its operations in Hyderabad as well. The platform currently boasts of nearly 200 coaches.
Housejoy has been looking for acquiring smaller startups ever since it raised $22 million in a Series B round, led by Amazon India. This will be company’s second acquisition in a month, after having acquired MyWash to scale up its laundry vertical. With that acquisition, Housjoy claimed to have become the largest player in laundry across India.
While Housejoy continues on this acquisition spree — more of which may come soon — on-demand economy is still not at its best, not just in India, but globally. If you look at how things turned out with Homejoy in the US, you’d get a fair bit of idea about the hassles involved un running and sustaining such a business. And while Housejoy has been doing a fairly good job as of now, riding on over $26 Million in funding, it will be interesting to see how the company evolves and sustains itself in these not-so-good times for this segment.
Housejoy’s main rivals though, aren’t sitting silent. Only yesterday Mumbai-based Zimmber had acquired hyperlocal services marketplace FindYahan. Earlier, Zimmber too acquired a laundry app Dhulai. Taskbob, Timesaverz, and UrbanClap are other well-backed players in this space.
Prior to the $22 million Series B round, the company had raised $4 million in Series A round of funding from Matrix Partners. Housejoy is eyeing presence in more than 10 cities with a gargantuan 50,000 service providers on the platform to serve 100,000 jobs per day.
Launched this January, Housejoy has been growing at a rapid pace on a month-on-month basis and is currently fulfilling more than 4000 orders a day. The startup has partnered with more than 10,000 service providers.
