Housejoy, Bangalore-based home services startup, seems to be in a trouble. The company’s co-founders — Arjun Kumar and Sunil Goel has reportedly quit, following an executive decision by the company’s board. Housejoy will now be managed by its professional CEO.
As per the report from Money Control, which cites unnamed sources, the board “forced the founders to quit to create a single point of decision-making in the hands of professional CEO Saran Chatterjee. The investors did not want a three-headed management”.
However, this move has not been made public yet. Sunil Goel’s LinkedIn profile still shows that he is with Housejoy while Arjun Kumar’s profile has not been recently updated. But, Arjun Kumar has confirmed to MoneyControl that he is no longer a part of the company that he co-founded.
Saran Chatterjee was appointed Housejoy’s chief executive officer in the year 2015. Before joining Housejoy, he was vice president of product management at Flipkart and a key part of the e-commerce company’s leadership team for three years. Prior to that, he worked with Yahoo! for about six years in various roles.
According to the report, based on ex-employees of the company who were let go, the top management was often at loggerheads regarding some of the plans for the company. One of the ex-employee was quoted saying “founders were often kept out of the loop on some major decisions.”
Housejoy was launched in January 2015. The company’s services range from maintenance and home repairs to plumbing, electrical services, home cleaning, and computer repairs. It is also offering specialized services in beauty and in-house bridal make-up.
The company claims to service over 4,000 orders a day and competes with bigger rival UrbanClap in the home services space. Within a year of operation, the company had expanded its operations to 12 cities, however, it has rolled back operations.
Till now, the startup has raised $27 million in funding. In June 2015, it raised $4 million in Series A round from Matrix Partners and in December 2015, it secured $22.5 million in Series B round, which was led by Amazon and included new investors Vertex Ventures, Qualcomm and Ru-Net Technology Partners.
According to the documents filed with Registrar of Companies, Housejoy reported total revenue of Rs 17.1 crore in FY16, up from Rs 54.43 lakh in the previous year. Revenue from services stood at Rs 15.02 crore compared with Rs 21 lakh in FY15. However, losses also widened to Rs 67.55 crore in FY16 from Rs 3.53 crore in the previous year.
