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

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 progress in one place and the company has grown what it describes as a “network of experienced, local professionals” that are fully licensed, vetted and insured that it pairs homeowners with on projects.

“There’s all these individual contractors out there and even though they are very affordable, it’s very hard for them to get to the homeowners, as they don’t have much resources,” Wu, a Chinese immigrant, told TechCrunch. “So they come to us and we basically take care of it all.” For now, Eano is operating in the Bay Area and Los Angeles, with plans to expand to Seattle and Houston this year.

The company plans to take its new capital and “go deep into the product side.”

Once they become a client, homeowners can use Eano to select a certain remodeling package, and then they can check the project progress, communicate with the team and even see the progress through videos.

“We’re also helping contractors make communicating and receiving payment much easier,” Wu said. “We’re also helping these individual contractors increase the brand, and helping them with the administration and customer support side with our software.”

Jim Kim of Builders VC, said he first encountered Wu and Jung while they were at Wish.

“We invest in people, and when you can find extremely talented entrepreneurs who have built successful companies and still have the hunger to win, you jump in with a blank check,” he said. “We love Eano’s mission — combining a similar product sourcing strategy as Wish with technology to bring a better experience to all constituents in the antiquated construction industry.”

Kim is also impressed by the fact that Wu is driven to prove “that you don’t need to be a 55-year-old man wearing steel-toed boots to have a meaningful impact on construction.”

“We love that ethos — it matches with our thinking about backing entrepreneurs who don’t fit into the stereotypical box,” Kim said.