TaskEasy raises $12M for on-demand lawn mowing

Instead of being everything for everyone, TaskEasy wants to mow lawns and remove snow, period

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TaskEasy, an online platform for booking home maintenance professionals, today announced it has closed $12 million in Series B funding led by Delta Electronics Capital with participation from investors new (Moderne Ventures, MTD Products) and old (Grotech Ventures, Access Venture Partners, and Kickstart Fund).

The new round doubles TaskEasy’s total funding: the company had previously raised a $7 million Series A and a $5 million seed.

While many on-demand, home maintenance platforms you may have heard of (Handy, TaskRabbit, etc.) focus on a broad range of jobs, including cleaning, plumbing, and general handywork, TaskEasy just focuses on two tasks: lawn mowing and snow removal. Of course, that makes me wonder how the Salt Lake City-based company plans to compete, especially since some of those other players have raised a lot more money.

When I asked TaskEasy about this, company CEO Ken Davis pointed to the company’s prominence in organic search results for lawn mowing and snow removal as crucial to its market leadership. (Notably, the more general-purpose gigs site Thumbtack usually pops up near the top of the list too.)

Davis also told me that TaskEasy has the network effect to win:

“[N]ow that we are doing 40-50,000 jobs a month, we have such a scale that we can offer increased property density to contractors so they spend less time losing money driving from job to job and more time generating revenue actually mowing at properties. This means we can lower per mow costs so our customers win, while at the same time contractors are actually making more money for the same work day. This network effect will make it harder for anyone else to catch up.”

While it’s hard to say how true that is—network effects are certainly defensible but not impenetrable—it’s worth noting that TaskEasy’s firm commitment to its two services means it can dedicate its resources to doing those things well.

For example, when you go to the site and enter your home address for lawn mowing, TaskEasy requests that you outline the property on a GPS map so the contractor has a more specific idea of how much work is involved, down to the square foot. It also means you receive a more specific quote for the job price.

The area I traced (on my friend’s house in a Bay Area suburb) totaled up to 1,438 sq. ft. Pricing for that amount of space comes out to between $37 and $63 per week, depending on the level of service you want. You can also opt for a bi-weekly or one time mowing (each of which is more expensive than the last).

Either way, it’s clear that TaskEasy’s keen focus on lawn mowing and snow removal could work to its advantage when competing with the more catch-all on-demand services.

In addition to selling its services directly to homeowners, TaskEasy also works with property managers and real estate professionals, who can upload lists of properties to the site to more easily order services. I like to think of it as lawn mowing at enterprise scale.

To date, TaskEasy says it has carried out nearly a half million tasks across nearly 5,000 cities in every U.S. state. The company’s network of workers includes 5,000 contractors.

TaskEasy says it will use the new funding to continue developing the product.