Madrid-based Webel bags €550K from Trind Ventures, others to bring services to the doorstep

Madrid-based Webel, an on-demand home services marketplace, announced on Tuesday that it has raised €550K in Simple Agreement for Future Equity in a funding round led by Trind Ventures.

Tiburon (a superangel fund from Daniel Wild and Felix Artmann) and business angels such as Hugo Arévalo (founder of ThePowerMBA) also participated in the round. 

An undisclosed investor, who invested in five of Spanish’s current/future unicorns such as Glovo and Playtomic, joined the round.

Webel says it will use the funds to accelerate its growth and expansion, primarily in markets like Italy and Portugal. 

Addressing profitability & scalability

In this pandemic era, a major disruption in lifestyle and business transpired. But, with every challenge, there is an opportunity for growth and modernisation. 

It’s not necessary to leave the comfort of home to get services from professionals, – from plumbers to doctors, as these services can be brought right to the doorstep.

However, the real challenge is to build a model that could be profitable and scalable. 

Many startups that had tried before struggled with this, mainly due to low client repetition caused by platform leakage (users disintermediating the platform for future services once they met).

This is where Webel comes in! 

Webel is working on building a marketplace that would allow users to search, book and enjoy almost any service in the comfort of their homes.

Nacho Tejero, CEO of Webel, says “If you want people to repeat their order through your platform (hence paying a commission), the value created for both parties for doing so has to be greater than the economic value (take rate) you are taking from the transaction. If not, people will go off-platform.”

On-demand home services marketplace 

Webel was founded by Nacho Tejero, Carlos Estévez Rincón, Guillermo Mateo, and Javier Ginés Sánchez while at university. 

The founders built a platform where clients can book services in just five clicks. 

Simultaneously, Webel worked around creating value for their supply by building SaaS tools (e.g., Calendar, notifications, automated invoices) to easily manage their services, as well as an algorithm that would compare the professional’s repetition with its peers and reward most loyal suppliers with higher visibility and a lower commission. 

“And it worked incredibly well”, says Webel. 

Webel claims that on average, each customer currently books 8 services a year, which resulted in +75 per cent of their GMV coming from repeat customers. 

Additionally, the Spanish platform witnessed a 23 per cent monthly growth for 13 consecutive months. The company then expanded its operations into Barcelona, which represents 15 per cent of their total GMV thanks to a 55% MoM growth for the past 4 months,

Nacho says, “Now it’s time to bring Webel to millions of people’s hands, one by one. We have proved our model to be profitable & scalable, and with the funds raised, we want to achieve a larger scale. We will be soon expanding into new markets like Italy or Portugal.”