附近上门

, which operates an on-demand lawn care and maintenance, announced this morning it has raised $10.5 million in a growth round led by .

Subscribe to the 附近上门 Daily

Via its website and mobile app, the Austin-based company matches consumers with a lawn or outdoor service, and makes a percentage of every such service that is booked on its SaaS platform

Unlike many of the startups we cover, LawnStarter claims that it reached profitability earlier this year (unlike many of the tech companies that have gone public, or planned to go public, this year). With this new financing, the five-year-old startup has now raised of $17.7 million, according to 附近上门 data. and participated in the round as well.听

LawnStarter currently operates in 120 cities in the United States, including Austin, Nashville, Tenn., and San Diego, Calif. Its revenue and net income is growing at a rate of 100 percent year-over-year, according to CEO and co-founder .听

History

LawnStarter was originally born in northern Virginia. Co-founders Corcoran and Ryan Farley (who had a lawn operation together while in high school) learned to code and had a 鈥渇ully functional product鈥� in six weeks. The pair, armed with a 100 customers, moved the startup鈥檚 headquarters to Austin with acceptance into Austin program. They enlisted their third co-founder, , to improve upon the platform what they had built.

鈥淲e saw a huge opportunity to help lawn care professionals and change the way consumers order and manage services,鈥� he told me. 鈥淓very rock I turned over made it super apparent how hard it was to run and scale lawn care operations.鈥�

Indeed, the lawn care market is massive, estimated at nearly $100 billion annually. (Specifically, an estimated $99 billion will be spent on lawn and landscape services in 2019 in the U.S. alone, according to an )

, partner at Edison Partners said his firm was impressed with how LawnStarter鈥檚 ability to achieve profitability 鈥渞esponsibly, in a way that鈥檚 extremely capital efficient.鈥�

鈥淭hat鈥檚 unique in this day and age in the startup community,鈥� he told 附近上门 News.

Edison also sees 鈥渆normous鈥� opportunity in a 鈥渉ighly fragmented鈥� industry. Especially in an era where millennials are more likely to outsource this sort of work than perform it themselves.

鈥淭here鈥檚 half a million service providers and 70 percent are owner-operated,鈥� 聽said. 鈥淪everal companies have tried to tackle the space but LawnStarter, we think, is the largest and has proven some really innovative capital efficient ways to grow.鈥�

With its new capital, LawnStarter plans to add additional services such as pest control to its platform, and 鈥渃ontinue penetrating the lawn mowing and maintenance markets.鈥澛�

Meanwhile, the funding marks Edison Partners鈥� second investment in Texas. The firm has also invested in , an Irving-based institutional investment management platform. For more about why Edison thinks Texas is a great place to be investing, check out this piece here.

Illustration: