Weaver has closed a $4 million seed round to expand nationally.
The round was led by European VC btov Partners, with participation from FJ Labs, Enterprise Fund, and Dr. Heitmann.
The startup raised over $5 million in pre-seed financing from a number of angels, bringing its total raised to date to over $5 million.
Weaver's platform matches homeowners and architects with appropriate contractors, facilitating obtaining quotes and price comparison, without the usual friction from having to manually research and reach out to contractors.
It is intended to house key comms around the contract negotiation/bid process through baked in messaging, document exchange and on-site meeting scheduling features. The platform keeps all parties in the loop and can be used to track compliance.
We started off bootstrapping and looking for a product/market fit with no-code software. It took around one and a half years to reach product/market fit on a proprietary platform when we invited two tech founders to join us in 2020.
Contractors on Weaver's platform are manually screened by the startup before being allowed into the marketplace where they have a chance to bid for high end projects.
Weaver checks the quality of their work and any other concerns, such as early signs of insolvency. Weaver is involved in the case of problems during the build.
Weaver is fixing a fundamental problem of communication between homeowners and contractors in the following order.
The first proper platform for home renovations is built by us, where users can exchange information via messaging, document sharing, and
Despite the hype, construction tech will be hard to disrupt
Construction is not a single market to quickly scale across but rather a series of distinct sub-markets which can have their own workflows and suppliers.
There are opportunities to apply the specificity that a strong software as a service offering can bring to the landscape.
Weaver is targeting its marketplace at a top-slice of home renovation projects, where the size of the project is not only large enough to support monetize via a success fee on contractors but the risks involved for all parties. The plan is to make fully insured escrow payments for homeowners.
The startup plans to add an extra carrot for contractors in the form of fast payments, as well as transitioning its platform from a desktop cloud-first to mobile-first product to better align with where user engagement in this home renovation is.
It will be using renovations pricing data to create more utility for homeowners and will aim to give these.
We are on our way to becoming the leaders in renovation pricing in our market, which we are confident will establish us as the go-to solution for renovation price index.
He says the issue there is homeowners under-budget by 10%- 30%, as they are using standard multiples taken from crude averages. If Weaver can provide pricing info for the specific project from the beginning, homeowners may be willing to pay for it.
Only a small percentage of homeowners use a traditional architect for a renovation project. Weaver wants to step in and support homeowners since he suggests that architects typically only introduce one contractor per project.
The startup is partnering with third party firms that produce fixed-price architectural drawings so it can offer their services to homeowners who don't use a traditional architect.
A success fee from contractors who win a project through the marketplace, an access fee for homeowners, and tiered pricing are part of Weaver's business model.
While there is growing concern in the UK over a cost of living crisis, with energy bills set to soar next month when a price cap expires, on top of rising inflation and wider economic concerns linked to global and other trade-related events
The impact of the cost of living crisis on demand for renovations is not something we are concerned about.
We are seeing macro economics pushing more households into renovations to combat energy hikes with properly insulated homes, whilst at the same time reducing household emissions. The UK government is expected to increase subsidies on home insulations and eco-boilers to tackle 40% of UK emissions.
Weaver's marketplace, which has been live for over four years at this point, has processed over $120 million worth of construction to-date, with the startup noting that orders on the platform in 2021 grew 2.6x over. There are around 400 contractor companies, 300 architect firms and 900 homeowners/individual users registered at this stage.
The seed funds will be used to expand Weaver's footprint in the UK to serve more of the domestic home renovation market. The service covers Greater London, South East England, Manchester, and other areas.
He says it has an eye on Germany and the US, where it believes the market dynamics are similar to the UK. Although the Victorian house renovations that may be typical of many domestic projects undertaken via Weaver's platform would, presumably, not be the norm as it expands into country with very different types of housing stock.
Our largest investors are based in the two markets where there is a very fragmented market for contractors.
Resi and Houzz are our closest competitors in the UK. It would be called Sweeten and Block renovation in the US. We are the only startup that targets architects.
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