Introducing Humming Homes | Our Latest Fundraise and the Future of Home Services
By Adeel Mallick, Co-Founder and CEO of Humming Homes
Today was a big day for the Humming Homes team, as we announced our fundraise of $8.1M to-date, with our most recent $5.6M Seed raise — a deal that will fuel our continued growth as we look to expand beyond our initial footprint in the Northeast.
But for me personally, today was about more than just funding. It’s about sharing our mission with the world to reimagine home management for today’s homeowner. It’s about harnessing the power of technology to become the country’s most-trusted home services partner. Solving the most fundamental problems of home ownership to help every customer have more good days at home.
This latest round was led by Ian Sigalow at Greycroft, who will be joining our Board, with participation from Kevin Ryan & AlleyCorp, Sound Ventures, Thrive Capital, New Valley Ventures, and prominent angel investor Abby Miller Levy.
The genesis of Humming Homes
In many ways, Humming Homes is a culmination of everything my partner Kyle Carnes and I have ever worked for. It’s also a reflection of every life experience I’ve had growing up in a first generation immigrant household. Being the son of an entrepreneur, I’d like to think that I have some founder DNA.
That said, the genesis of Humming Homes began when I was in business school at MIT Sloan. Beyond the classroom, I spent all my free time exploring the world of real estate technology having worked at Katerra and investing at Sound Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners. It was those experiences that allowed me to see so much of the category broadly and make meaningful connections to help further all the ideas I initially had.
After being introduced to Kevin Ryan, a serial tech entrepreneur, and his NYC-based venture capital firm AlleyCorp, I started digging into the macro trends around homeownership and the broader home services industry. I found it remarkable that there had been such little innovation in one of the largest categories of household spend. Namely, anything to do with home maintenance and improvement.
I was then introduced to my now-partner Kyle through a mutual friend. He had just hit his five-year mark at Instacart, having helped scale the rapidly growing company as an operations leader, and was looking for an opportunity to go from 0 to 100 with another offline industry. As we spent more time together exploring the home services market, a clear and massive opportunity began to present itself.
Sadly, Kyle lost his dad around the same time. It was then that the burden of home ownership began to strike a personal chord, as he saw first-hand how hard it was to help his mother maintain their family home in Oregon while sitting 3,000 miles away. He knew that a home management platform was much needed to help her take care of their most expensive asset, and that other homeowners could benefit from the same type of service.
The platform we had been brainstorming was the answer. It became clear to us that a new, innovative approach could radically transform the ownership experience by saving homeowners time and delivering peace of mind.
The modern homeowner deserves more
Home ownership is hard. While the idea of owning a home can be equal parts exciting and overwhelming, it’s also a highly emotional experience that can envelop someone’s memories, dreams, and aspirations. Beyond that, most home management services today fail to meet the needs of the modern homeowner, creating an immense gap between their expectation and reality.
According to The National Association of Realtors, 40% of all single-family, owner-occupied home purchases between 2020 and 2021 were by people under the age of 40. These individuals are younger and more tech-savvy, but, from a generational standpoint, they’re the least equipped to manage a home. They’re also often stretched for time, and, as first-time buyers who had previously rented, don’t have the expertise to immediately know what to do, which vendors they can trust, and how much things should cost.
Even more important, 68% of all U.S. households are now dual-income, meaning it’s very likely that the burden of managing all aspects of home maintenance and improvement falls unequally across already stretched homeowners. Gone are the days when one person manages the home and one person goes to work. Even when the couples we speak with are able to carve out time to tackle a home services to-do list, they simply don’t know where to start.
Many consumers will spend more time managing their home than actually enjoying it. Homes are incredibly complex, and this new type of homeowner needs more than just a band-aid fix or set of inherited vendors to help. That’s where we want to upend the status quo.
We realized early on that all homeowners deserve — and are demanding — better. What we ultimately created was an end-to-end management solution to best serve the needs of today’s homeowner. A proprietary tech-enabled service built on reliability and transparency, with a mix of in-person and centralized support so there’s no single point of failure, data-driven recommendations to help preserve the value of your home, and a marketplace to facilitate services through robustly vetted partners.
Today a fundraise, tomorrow the world
Humming Homes has grown rapidly since our launch in October 2020, now operating in neighborhoods across the Tri-State area with over half a billion worth of ($500MM) homes under management. Our initial focus will be to trailblaze towards some of the hottest suburban single family home markets across Florida, Texas, California, and Arizona before scaling out to the mass market.
It’s incredible what we’ve been able to build in this short amount of time with the support of Kevin, Ian, and our other investors. That said, we know where we’re going. Our vision is to become the country’s most-trusted home services partner — and with today’s announcement, we’re poised to do just that. But why stop there? We won’t rest until every home in the country is a Humming Home.
