Made Renovation
Made Renovation cofounders Roger Dickey and Sagar Shah
- Roger Dickey has previously started three other startups and invested in more than 60. His latest venture? Remodeling bathrooms.
- Made Renovations designs bathrooms, purchases the building equipment, and then coordinates with contractors to complete the renovation.
- The company has come out of stealth round with a $9 million seed round led by Base10 Partners, with funding from from Felicis Ventures and Peter Thiel's Founders Fund. The company has also launched a San Francisco showroom.
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Since Uber's meteoric rise, Silicon Valley has continued to bring tech philosophy, and tech funding, to physical world problems.
Last year's record $31.6 billion in funding for real-estate tech, and rising investment energy in logistics and agriculture are leading indicators that the tech world's focus is increasingly on problems beyond a screen.
Another sign? A Silicon Valley veteran is turning his eyes towards construction. Specifically, remodeling bathrooms.
Roger Dickey, the founder and chief executive of Made Renovation, has already founded three other startups, and invested in more than 60. His first, Dope Wars, was a criminally minded Facebook game that was sold to Zynga, where it became Mafia Wars. His second, Gigster, was a company that provided software and tech consulting to large corporations. His third, Untitled Labs, launched last year. It is a "search lab," and plans to incubate consumer-focused companies in a variety of verticals.
Dickey left Gigster in January of last year, a year and a half after the company raised $20 million in new funding from investors including Redpoint Ventures, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, actor-turned-investor Ashton Kutcher, and the basketball legend Michael Jordan.
Made Renovations, his newest venture, just announced that it has raised $9 million in seed funding in a round led by Base10 Partners, with funding from from Felicis Ventures and Peter Thiel's Founders Fund. The startup has also launched a retail showroom on San Francisco's Chestnut Street.
Made Renovations launched a website in May of 2019, and a month later, was starting to remodel bathrooms. It's not a typical general contractor: Made Renovation's direct employees don't swing any hammers. Instead, the company markets, designs, and buys materials for contractors, and then hires contractors to do multiple jobs at once.
"We think of contractors as our true customers," Dickey told Business Insider.
Dickey's original inspiration for the business came from the scarcity of qualified contractors in San Francisco, especially those who would be willing to work on jobs as small as a bathroom. By offering contractors a queue of potential bathroom remodels, Made Renovations is able to give them constant and easily repeatable work. Contractors also save money on sales and marketing costs and effort.
This means that Made Renovations pays lower prices than a one-off remodel, some of which are then passed on to the consumer. The company claims to be 20-30% cheaper for consumers than a typical one-off remodel.
The company's design team prioritized ease of construction and elegant, but affordable design. By reusing as many materials as possible, storing the rest in their East Bay warehouse, the company can lower costly material waste. Dickey said that his designers would "geek out" when figuring out how to make beautiful bathroom designs more affordable. They would then make 3D renderings of potential designs and advertise them on social platforms. The designs that got the most engagement were the designs that the company decided to actually build.
Dickey said that the company will likely expand to another city this year where "supply and demand are out of whack and where price per square foot for construction is skyrocketing," like it's experience in San Francisco. He thinks that this market will only expand as building costs rise and there just aren't enough general contractors to satisfy demand.
As for moving past the bathroom? Dickey said that they might do so in a few years, but that the next most obvious target, the kitchen, is much more complicated, more variable, and has a slightly smaller market.
"Bathrooms are a 2.4 million (renovations) a year and $20 billion market in the US. That's quite enough for us right now," Dickey said.