Thumbtack, which handles marketing and job listings for professionals like yoga instructors and electricians, has raised $125 million and is now valued at about $1.3 billion.
The investment catapults the six-year-old start-up into the ranks of the unicorns, a popular term for privately held companies that are valued at more than $1 billion. Thumbtack was valued at around $750 million last year. The Scottish money management firm Baillie Gifford led the latest funding, which nearly doubles the amount of money Thumbtack has raised, and previous investors including Tiger Global, Google Capital and Sequoia Capital also participated.
“We’re at the stage where we need to think about having a permanent capital base,” said Marco Zappacosta, Thumbtack’s co-founder and chief executive. The new investment is what is known as a late-stage financing; the start-up previously raised five other funding rounds.
Baillie Gifford, a global money management firm with about $173 billion in assets under management, typically invests in companies, usually publicly traded, for the long haul. “The venture investors do have to exit sometime and we want to invite in additional, long-term stakeholders that can support the sort of big, independent business we want to build,” said Mr. Zappacosta.
Thumbtack was part of a list recently created by the research firm CB Insights of 50 companies that might next hit the billion-dollar valuation mark. Before Thumbtack revealed its latest funding round, CB Insights said that three other companies from the list had hit that threshhold.
Bryan Schreier, an investor at Sequoia who worked on the Thumbtack investment, said that the start-up is looking at an unusually large investment opportunity because it “is already delivering more than [$1 billion worth of business] to independent professionals, yet they’re still only scratching the surface of the $500 billion plus local services market.”
Original Article by Katie Benner
