Specifx Data, a San Francisco-based data software startup for HVAC systems, has raised $3.5 million in seed capital, the company announced to Axios.

Why it matters: The funding will help Specifx bring its first HVAC data collection app to market, just in time for the proposed SEC emissions disclosure rules to go into effect.

Details: Powerhouse Ventures led the all-equity round and received an observer seat on the board of the transaction.

• Better Ventures, Blackhorn Ventures, SaaS Ventures and Soma Capital also participated in the round.
• The company began raising funds in November after founding the company over the summer, CEO Ryan Martineau told Axios. The round ended in March.

How it works: Specifx’s software analyzes the performance of HVAC systems across an organization’s portfolio using insights gained from unit model numbers.

• The company’s software can detect how old the device is, which parts may need to be replaced, what type of coolant is being used and how much energy is being used. The company’s main app, Decoder, will be available in stores this month, Martineau says.
• Specifx is working to use this information to develop recommendations for property managers, e.g. B. when a unit needs to be replaced or if the unit meets local HVAC codes.

What we observe: Specifx works with large companies that have massive real estate footprints — think Bank of America or Walmart — that don’t necessarily have incentives to upgrade aging, inefficient HVAC systems until those systems fail.

• It remains to be seen whether the SEC’s proposed disclosure rules will change this calculation for these companies.

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Life in Lagos, Nigeria’s trading city, is not for the faint of heart. The city with around 14 million inhabitants is the largest in sub-Saharan Africa.

And due to traffic jams and long hours, most busy professionals find it difficult to cope with everyday tasks like cooking or cleaning the house.

Although restaurants and household cleaning companies offer options for people who want to outsource these tasks, the market is still open to providers who can offer more convenience and quality.

Eden life, strategically Positioning itself as the premier platform for home service needs has raised a $ 1.4 million seed round to increase its market share.

LocalGlobe, a UK-based venture capital company, led the way. Africa-focused VCs Samurai Incubate, Future Africa, Village Global, Rising Tide Africa and Enza Capital took part.

In 2019 Nadayar Enegesi, Prosper Otemuyiwa and Silm Momoh founded Eden Life. The platform enables customers to schedule three housekeeping services – eating, laundry and cleaning – via a mobile application.

When the founders, Ex-Andelans (a term to describe former Andela employees), launched the home service app two years ago, it caused quite a few eyebrows. At that time, founders were increasingly launching projects in the fintech, e-commerce and logistics sectors, so it was surprising to see Enegesi and his co-founders move into an area that many believed was not profitable for a technology company in Nigeria.

“The reason was personal for us,” said Enegesi, CEO of the startup and co-founder of Unicorn Andela, in an interview. The founders started talking about the concept of home services simple when the now popular idea that Nigerians were en masse to leave in search of greener pastures took shape.

Enegesi could understand why people really wanted to move. Comparing his previous stay in Toronto with Lagos, the CEO found that his quality of life in a city that has been described in several reports as one of the worst places in the world has been massively affected.

While widespread stressors such as inadequate power supplies and poor roads are out of reach for citizens, the founders believed that the provision of domestic services such as food delivery and laundry was within reach and would improve the quality of life for some urban workers.

After Eden Life. raised a $ 600,000 pre-seed round for family and friends, started to aim Millennials and Gen Zs that hectic lives, especially in the tech field who work as executives, developers and freelancers.

Credit: Eden life

Customers can subscribe to one or three of the services, and according to the company, people try their food services before the others and it’s not hard to see why.

Initially, Eden employed a simple distribution model of delivering groceries selected by customers from a variety of third-party suppliers. But the process soon became a challenge for the company of a Quality point of view.

“You are simple so many questions about standards. We have learned that many of these small service companies do not have the tools or equipment to deliver at a high level, ”said Enegesi. “We learned that many of them have no training for their employees. We have learned that they do not have the right business processes in order to be able to output the same quality every time. “

At the end of last year, the company realized it had to invest in setting and building these standards if it was to deliver the best customer experience.. What followed was a vertical integration with the grocery department when Eden launched its kitchen and is now producing its meals. significant Enhancing the dining experience for customers.

Access to laundry and house cleaning services is available easy however different. For the former, Eden works with established laundromats in various locations in Lagos and has a network of freelancers that it trains quarterly to do the cleaning. Then logistics company Gokada handles about 75% of the company’s food and laundry deliveries.

What is the traction like for the company? For my part, I am an avid user of Eden’s food service and more than 600 people use one to three of the services. The average customer uses two services five times a week.

Across the board, customers pay an average subscription of $ 100 per month – a fee that can and can cover a daily meal plan or weekly cleaning biweekly Laundry schedule. These plans are monitored by trained professionals called gardeners who are in constant communication with Eden users to provide prompts and receive feedback.

A quick calculation of the customer base and average subscription shows that Eden has about $ 60,000 in monthly revenue. However, the CEO declined to comment on any particular number, just saying that the company had more sales than the proposed number.

According to LocalGlobe General Partner Remus Brett, Eden’s customer obsession and attention to detail stood out along with a key first mover advantage for the main investor.

He said his company “fell in love with Eden Life’s vision for the future of home services in Africa” ​​and that “combining that advantage with a core team with a proven track record of building African technology to an unrivaled level makes Eden Life an exciting one.” Brings away “. of growth. ”

Credit: Eden life

Since its inception, Eden Life has provided over 60,000 services in Lagos alone. The company has yet to penetrate other markets in Nigeria and will not use these funds to do so. Instead, Eden plans to build its in-house technology, scale its team, and use food production facilities and operational centers for sales (which provides an opportunity to explore the dark kitchen model)..

“Lagos is a tough market and we have to make sure everything works,” said Enegesi. “We had to keep working on the fine-tuning and are currently concentrating on making things run very smoothly here. After that we will have talks about where to expand next. “

Africa is the fastest urbanizing continent in the world with a growing middle class. And although Eden Life does not plan to penetrate other markets, some regional players such as the home cleaning service SweepSouth are currently moving into the West African country.

But Enegesi is not worried; the models are very different. Eden operates horizontally combining grocery, laundry and house cleaning services, while SweepSouth takes a more vertical approach to house cleaning.

From a lean model perspective, it seems a better model to run a single service and add more as you scale than to run three services simultaneously. Nevertheless, the expansive model has worked perfectly for Eden so far.

“Our strength is operational complexity because solving any of these things is not going to give our customers the experience we want,” said the CEO. “It is important that we create a complete living experience for people, and does that mean it can take longer than other things? Sure, but it also means that people will have a hard time going up against us. As I said, it’s personal and there has to be something like that. and Happily, We are the ones who can do it. “

Although Eden has a vertical integration strategy to own and manage its entire supply chain and deliver its services without the need for third party vendors, it will also bring more horizontal products to market in the coming months.

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NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE) – Humming Homes, a technology-enabled property management solution for single-family homes in suburban markets, announced today that a Greycroft-led $ 5.6 million seed increase involving AlleyCorp, Thrive Capital, Sound Ventures, New Valley Ventures, and prominent angel investor Abby Miller Levy.

Founded by Adeel Mallick, CEO, Kyle Carnes, Head of Operations, and serial tech entrepreneur Kevin Ryan, Chairman of the Board, Humming Homes is committed to making home ownership easier and more enjoyable. With the aim of becoming the most trusted home services partner in the country, it has developed an end-to-end management solution based on software for single family home owners. With a digital-first experience, dedicated personal home management teams with a single point of contact, live support around the clock, and data and insights to avoid reactive and expensive home maintenance problems, the system is designed to revise its importance as owning a home own and maintain.

The financing will fuel Humming Homes’ continued growth as the company seeks to expand beyond its original Northeast markets and provide a modern alternative to the established home service providers.

“Seasoned homeowners know that managing a home is like having a second job. Homes require constant maintenance, from landscaping to seasonal cleaning of HVAC, chimneys, windows, and siding. Homeowners have a long list of contractors and suppliers, and you never know if prices are fair, ”said Ian Sigalow, co-founder and partner at Greycroft, who will join the board. “Humming Homes solves the problem of how difficult it is for most people to manage their most valuable asset – their home.”

According to The National Association of Realtors, 40% of all single-family home purchases between 2020 and 2021 were made by those under the age of 40 and more space shows no signs of quitting.

“We have the youngest consumer, the most tech-savvy and, from a generation perspective, the least equipped to manage a home in terms of time and experience available. Today’s first-time homeowners have limited resources to help them transition from renting to home, ”said Adeel Mallick, CEO of Humming Homes. “More importantly, 68% of all US households now have a double income, which means that the burden of managing all aspects of home maintenance and improvement is very likely unevenly distributed among already strained homeowners.”

Although the home services market accounts for over $ 500 billion in consumer spending, according to a recent study by Angi, there has not yet been a category winner. Humming Homes is focused on providing a homeowner-first solution with an initial target customer base of the “mass affluent” – single-family homes valued at more than $ 750,000 and in dense, sought-after home markets such as The Hamptons, Greenwich, Westchester, Miami, Fort Lauderdale , Greater Los Angeles, Scottsdale, and Texas (Austin, Houston, etc.).

“This is a huge opportunity – the average homeowner in the US spends 1% to 2% of their home value annually on maintenance and improvement,” continued Mr. Mallick. “Our target audience, which is only 10% of all households in the US, spends nearly 50% of the total household services market. Homes are inherently complex and the next generation of homeowners will need more than just a patch or a set of inherited vendors to help – and this is where we want to turn the status quo on its head. ”Humming Homes has been around since the services were launched Grown rapidly in October 2020. It now operates in markets across the tri-state area including The Hamptons, NY, Westchester, NY, and Greenwich, CT, and manages $ 500 million of home worth.

They also recently entered into a strategic partnership with Douglas Elliman (“DE”) for additional access to sales during the property purchase process, facilitated by an investment from their venture arm New Valley Ventures. Humming Homes will partner with DE to launch in additional tri-state markets in the coming months as well as the South Florida area including Miami, Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale later in 2021.

Humming Homes was founded in early 2020 and incubated with AlleyCorp, a venture capital firm and studio led by Kevin Ryan (previously raised $ 2.5 million). The latest funding brings the total capital to $ 8.1 million. The company’s founding team has a background in real estate, on-demand marketplaces and technology-enabled services.

About Humming Homes

Humming Homes reinvents property management for the modern homeowner. On the way to becoming one of the most trusted home operators in the world, the company is creating a new category of end-to-end property management that uses data and insights to avoid reactive and costly home maintenance problems. It has developed a technology-enabled solution for single family home owners with a digital experience that offers a dedicated personal property management team with a single point of contact for 24/7 support. For more information about Humming Homes, please visit www.humminghomes.com.

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It was an eventful fall for Perigee CEO and founder Mollie Breen. The former NSA employee participated in the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield in September. She just completed her first Thanksgiving starting round and gave her a $ 1.5 million runway to start building the company.

The Outsiders Fund led the round with the participation of Westport, Contour Venture Partners, BBG Ventures, Innospark Ventures and a few individual investors.

Perigee wants to secure areas of the company such as HVAC systems or elevators that can interact with the company’s network but are often outside the typical range of network security monitoring. According to Breen, the company’s value proposition is about bridging the gap between network security and operational security. She said this has been a corporate blind security patch that is often caught between these two teams. Perigee offers a range of analytics to help the security team gain insight into this vulnerable area.

As Breen explained when we talked about their battlefield round in September, the solution learns normal behavior from the operating systems when interacting with the network and collects data such as: B. which systems and people normally access it. It can then determine when something appears to be off and truncate an abnormal act that may indicate hacker activity before it reaches the network.

She says that as the funded founder she knows exactly how rare this is, and one reason she wanted to post this funding round was to show other women who are considering starting a business this is is possible, even if this is possible remains difficult.

She plans to grow the company to around six people in the next 12 months, and Breen says she is thinking deeply about how to build a diverse organization. She says that starts with her investors and includes considering diversity in terms of gender, race, and age. She believes it is important to start with the earliest employees and is actively recruiting various candidates.

“I write a lot of cold emails, especially about attitudes. Part of this is because everything comes in with job vacancies and one cannot necessarily guarantee that it will be diverse. By writing cold emails, really following these people, and having these conversations, I’ve found a way to make sure I’m talking to people from different perspectives, ”she said.

As she looks to 2021, she ponders the best way to approach the office versus remote control and says that with some people it will likely be largely remote control. “I’m really balancing at this point, how do we really make the connections and with a lot of confidence make them strong and real and do it by balancing some elements of the remote knowing that the industry is going there and when you get one Business and wanting to be in a post-2020 world you will likely have to prepare for an element of remote working, ”she said.

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