Thumbtack, a startup that helps people find the right plumber or personal trainer, said on Tuesday that it has raised $125 million in new funding.
The new funding brings Thumbtack‘s valuation to $1.25 billion, making it the latest company to become a “unicorn,” defined as a company with a value of at least $1 billion.
The company has grown rapidly. Just last year, Thumbtack was valued at $750 million following a $100 million round, according to a Thumbtack spokesperson. To date, Thumbtack has raised $273.2 million in funding.
Six-year-old Thumbtack lets service providers advertise on its marketplace, and vets inquiries from customers looking to hire a professional for a job or project. While free for those customers, it charges professionals a fee when they send out a quote to a potential customer.
The company says it has already generated more than $1 billion in business for the more than 200,000 professionals that use its platform. But the market for such services is getting increasingly competitive.
Though Thumbtack is open to service providers of a wide variety—from piano teachers to gardeners—big competitors like Amazon (AMZN) and Google (GOOG) are cropping up in the home services sector. It also competes with well-known players like reviews sites Yelp and Angie’s List, as well as new upstarts like Pro.com.
For Thumbtack, Google and Amazon’s entrance in the market creates mixed feelings. “If you ask me who I want to compete with, Google and Amazon probably wouldn’t be at the top of the list,” co-founder and CEO Marco Zappacosta told Coins2Day on Tuesday. However, he also sees it as validation of the market’s size and opportunity, and doesn’t believe either one of these giants has a real advantage over his company.
Thumbtack says it plans to use its new funds to develop even more tools for both professionals and customers using its site for things like payments, scheduling, invoicing, and business management. “We want to be able to help with a project’s entire lifecycle,” Zappacosta wrote in a blog post announcing the new funding.
Whether these new tools and features will be free, paid, or somewhere in the middle is still to be determined, said Zappacosta. He doesn’t intend for these to become a whole new revenue stream, however, but simply complements to make Thumbtack even easier to use.
The company also says it will invest in developing technology that filters and matches customers inquiries with available professionals. Though that process is already entirely automated, Zappacosta added that he thinks it can be much more sophisticated.
This latest round of funding, led by Scottish investment firm Baillie Gifford, with participation from existing investors Tiger Global, Google Capital, and Sequoia Capital, is Thumbtack’s sixth round. And while this would ordinarily raise questions of a potential IPO is in the not-so-distant future, Zappacosta assured us it’s not something his company is actively preparing for at the moment or in the near term.
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(This story has been updated with additional comments from Thumbtack CEO Marco Zappacosta.)
