Last year, Jessica Fain was frustrated by how much work her Bay Area house needed.
There was the cord for internet that snaked out of her garage and into the living room. Towel rack holders that needed to be attached to the wall. A door that would not close.
But friends had convinced her that she and her husband — both non-D.I.Y. people, by her own admission — should try using Casa, a new start-up promising to offer a home management service for a monthly fee.
Casa is now preparing to formally announce itself to the world after laboring in so-called stealth mode for about two years. Its founders, two veterans of Travis Kalanick-era Uber, say the company offers services like handymen on call and proactive home maintenance work.
“It’s a full-time concierge that can reach out for any home project you might have,” Michael York, a Casa founder and its chief executive, said in an interview.
The company is the latest effort to streamline the business of hiring repair workers, though many, like TaskRabbit, function more like marketplaces. (Confusingly, one similar business is also named Casa, and it has a similar web address.)
But Casa has amassed some influential backers who have collectively invested about $27 million. They include the venture capital firms Forerunner Ventures and Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners, which was co-founded by Sheryl Sandberg, the former Meta chief operating officer. Mr. Kalanick is also backing the venture.
Mr. York said that he and his fellow Casa founder, Michael Mizrahi, were inspired by their interest in home-improvement activities, and by their careers in packaging up real-world services in digital offerings, including at Uber and at CloudKitchens, Mr. Kalanick’s ghost restaurant company.
By mid-2024, Casa was born.
When members sign up for the service, a team digitally catalogs their entire home with gadgets including lidar scanners and a device that can detect the shade of paint on a wall.
The on-boarding process compiles a list of potential work to be done, with an allocation of 1.5 hours’ worth of complimentary “handyman time” each month. (Users pay for services beyond that.) And artificial intelligence software keeps track of what might need fixing and when.
“The ultimate vision is that Casa is building the autonomous home,” Mr. York said.
The repair work is done by individuals like Franco Biondi, once a factory manager in Peru. Mr. Biondi, who is based in San Francisco, said that he had done tasks like installing thermostats and building daybeds and tree houses. Casa tells him exactly what needs to be done.
“It’s very efficient,” Mr. Biondi said. “We don’t waste time. We don’t waste the members’ time.”
In the case of Ms. Fain, a software product manager, Casa quickly plowed through her to-do list. When her dishwasher broke, she said, the service gave her three options for replacing it and offered to purchase her choice on her behalf.
Casa’s business revolves solely around membership fees, currently around $200 a month, rather than through other revenue streams like payments from service providers. That aligns the company with customers, Mr. York argued, adding that the company has a 97 percent member retention rate.
Handymen benefit from steady work from Casa members, Mr. York added. For some, the service has become a full-time job: Mr. Biondi says that he averages about 40 hours to 50 hours of work a week from the platform, and usually does three to four home visits a day.
The business model benefits everyone involved, according to Kirsten Green, the founder of Forerunner, which led Casa’s $20 million Series A round this year. Technology helps the company operate efficiently, and those cost savings get passed onto customers.
Casa operates only in the Bay Area and Los Angeles, but Mr. York and Ms. Green said that the company was eyeing up to six more markets. Yet the team, Ms. Green said, does not seem inclined to repeat Mr. Kalanick’s strategy at Uber of burning money to expand rapidly. “Will we spend like crazy” on customer acquisition, she asked. “That’s not the intention.”
Another hurdle will be in persuading potential new members to sign up for what is still a pricey service. Mr. York compared the current nearly $200-a-month offering to Uber’s original car-on-demand service, and said the company had the ability to eventually lower prices.
Yet another challenge, Mr. York conceded, is ensuring that the quality of service does not worsen as it expands. “If we’re not earning your business every month,” he said, “you’ll leave.”
For now, Ms. Fain intends to remain a member, with Casa monitoring her washing machine every six months and taking on projects like installing a bike shed. She is also compiling a wish list of additional services, like planning children’s parties and car maintenance.
