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ManoMano raises $355 million for its home improvement e-commerce platform

by Romain Dillet

French startup ManoMano has raised a Series F funding round of $355 million led by Dragoneer Investment Group. The company operates an e-commerce platform focused on DIY, home improvement and gardening products. It is currently available in six European countries. Following today’s funding round, the company has reached a valuation of $2.6 billion.

In addition to Dragoneer Investment Group, Temasek, General Atlantic, Eurazeo, Bpifrance’s Large Venture fund, Aglaé Ventures, Kismet Holdings and Armat Group are also participating.

“We operate in Europe and we are the industry leader in online sales,” co-founder and co-CEO Philippe de Chanville told me. In France in particular, the company has been profitable for a couple of years already. In 2020 alone, the company’s gross merchandise volume doubled to €1.2 billion ($1.42 billion at today’s rate).

So why did the company raise given that it’s already in a strong position to replicate the same model in other European markets? Because they could and because they didn’t need to. With a high valuation, ManoMano could raise quite a bit of money without having to sell a significant chunk of its equity.

In addition to France, the startup operates in Spain, Italy, Belgium, Germany and the U.K. With today’s funding round, the company wants to develop its activities in the U.K. and Germany in particular — they are Europe’s two biggest markets for home improvement and gardening.

ManoMano sells products to hobbyists and also targets the B2B market with ManoManoPro. It’s already working well in France with (Read more...)

Eano’s Stella Wu is not your typical construction tech startup founder

by Mary Ann Azevedo

Renovating a home is an exciting, yet often fraught-filled, endeavor.

One startup that aims to help make the process simpler, cheaper and less stressful by helping people manage the home renovation process has raised $6 million to help it grow even faster. Builders VC led the round, which included participation from Celtic, Newfund and Wish co-founder Danny Zhang, who also sits on Eano’s board.

Stella Wu, who formerly worked as a growth product manager at Wish, got firsthand experience of the pain points related to the process when she bought her own house in 2017.

“I realized there were a lot of fragmented issues in the renovation space, especially when it came to the individual workers,” she recalls. “They were not reliable and bad at communication.”

So in 2019 she founded Eano, a San Francisco-based startup that aims to walk a homeowner through a renovation and help connect individual contractors with new clients. Eano also works on projects like building ADUs (accessory dwelling units).

Construction tech startups are poised to shake up a $1.3-trillion-dollar industry

As more people spent time at home last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the startup saw its contract revenue spike by 5x, Wu says. And in the first quarter of this year, business was up 70% year over year.

Image Credits: Eano CEO and founder Stella Wu / Eano

Eano, she said, offers competitive and transparent pricing so that homeowners aren’t surprised as a remodeling project goes on. Its automated process tracks all communications and (Read more...)