Software giant, Jobber, announced Series D deal worth $100 million USD on February 7, 2023, making it one of the most successful tech companies to date out of the Edmonton Metropolitan Region. The company, which provides operations management software for home services businesses, worked with first time Jobber investor, General Atlantic, a New York growth equity investor that led the funding. This round also saw funding from existing Jobber investors: Summit Partners, Version One Ventures, and Tech Pioneers Fund. This increases Jobber’s total funding to date to $176 million USD, from a group that also includes OMERS Ventures. The capital financing will support Jobber’s continued growth including expanding their team, sales and marketing initiatives, new customer acquisition, and investment in R&D.
The Jobber app offers a full suite of features to support small businesses with: scheduling jobs, attracting new customers, communicating with customers within the app, sending professional looking invoices, managing cash flows to get paid faster, and keeping track of client and job information in one organized place.
In January of 2021, Jobber raised $60 million USD in funding led by Summit Partners and has since tripled its revenue. Currently, Jobber employs over 600 people across Canada, the United States, and parts of Latin America. With more than 6.2 million home services businesses just in North America, and an additional $100 million USD to invest in its company, Jobber can continue to expect tremendous and rapid revenue growth throughout 2023.
While other tech companies around the globe have been announcing mass-layoffs due to difficulty in raising capital, Jobber is thriving, and credits its success stems from the steady consumer demand of necessary services like plumbing, heating, residential lawncare, HVAC, painting, etc.
Jobber’s CEO and co-founder, Sam Pillar was quoted saying, “Your roof springs a leak, you fix it. If your air conditioner or your hot water tank or your furnace breaks, you’re gonna fix it. A sink explodes, you’re gonna fix it.”
Sam goes on to say that even through recessions or a global pandemic, things that consumers and home-owners perceive as an emergency or requiring immediate attention within the home will be dealt with and paid for promptly out of necessity. This makes Jobber’s business model more recession-proof than other tech companies.
Founded in 2011 by CEO Sam Pillar and CTO Forrest Zeisler, Jobber has helped small home services businesses do over $40 billion in invoices using its software for more than a decade and caters to more than 200,000 service professionals in over 60 countries. $13 billion USD in revenue was generated in 2022 alone. In September of 2022, Jobber was ranked as Canada’s 6th fastest growing company for 2022 in its revenue category of $100M- $250M.
Sam moved to Edmonton to study business and computer sciences at the University of Alberta. He has stated publicly that he has no immediate desire to relocate headquarters outside of Edmonton anytime soon. With a strong innovation ecosystem to support entrepreneurs including but not limited to Edmonton Unlimited, Alberta Innovates, StartupTNT, and Amii, start-ups in the Edmonton Region enjoy favourable conditions to build momentum and enter the global market.
Residents of the Edmonton Region enjoy a high standard of living and low cost of living compared to other major tech Regions like the Silicon Valley which makes it easy to attract and retain talent. Talent is also more affordable here than cities like San Francisco. We’re ranked third globally in AI research and are one of the fastest growing tech ecosystems in North America. Sam attributes Edmonton’s universities and colleges producing top talent as a major factor contributing to Jobber’s ability to take off so quickly.
“The quality of the talent that comes out of these institutions is high,” he told Innovating Canada.
He added that being in a smaller metropolitan Region allows companies to build a stronger presence faster than if they started out in a larger and more competitive Region like the San Francisco Bay Area.
“In Edmonton, we’re in a position where we’re pretty unique,” he said to Innovating Canada, “there are no other companies like us here.”
