UrbanYou, Australia’s leader in on-demand household services, has combined with Oneflare, Australia’s fastest growing source of trusted local services.
L-R Elke Keeley, Billy Tucker, Noga Edelstein
It is believed the deal will significantly accelerate the companies’ growth trajectory. With over one million users visiting Oneflare monthly, consumers across Australia will be offered the convenience of instant booking and payments, and exceptional service standards delivered through UrbanYou. For Oneflare’s more than 100,000 registered businesses, this provides even more opportunity to access genuine clients. Together, UrbanYou and Oneflare want to create Australia’s number one destination for trusted, reliable household services available on-demand.
Noga Edelstein and Elke Keeley founded UrbanYou in 2014 to solve the problem of sourcing reliable home help in an increasingly time poor world. The UrbanYou platform enables real-time booking and payments of household services, such as cleaning, gardening and carpet cleaning. UrbanYou has experienced rapid growth, delivering over 40,000 services across Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. In 2017, UrbanYou extended its successful consumer offering to a range of B2B customers across the real estate and property management sectors, and corporates as an Employee Benefit.
This 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,” said Noga Edelstein, co-founder of UrbanYou.
“One of the key ingredients to a successful marketplace is recurring usage, and this is where UrbanYou really excels. Each month 70% 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,” continued Edelstein.
Oneflare is one of Australia’s fastest growing marketplaces for local services, where every month over one million users go to get jobs done and connect with trusted service providers. With over 100,000 businesses registered, the Oneflare platform generates tens of thousands of job opportunities for cleaners, removalists, renovators, gardeners, and many more each month.
“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 Billy Tucker, CEO of Oneflare.
“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, Noga Edelstein and Elke 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.
In 2015, Oneflare successfully acquired Word of Mouth, Australia’s leading rating and reviews platform for services. Word of Mouth aligns perfectly with Oneflare and UrbanYou’s focus on quality, trust and referrals, and will be heavily featured in the UrbanYou offering.
