BOSTON, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dispatch today announced the close of a $3.1M round of seed funding and unveiled the industry’s first scheduling and delivery platform for on-demand services. The company’s strategic financing was co-led by Promus Ventures and GrandBanks Capital, and included Salesforce Ventures, prominent individual investors Ray Lane and Mark Goldstein, as well as Launch Capital and Kima Ventures.
Dispatch’s proprietary platform brings businesses into the on-demand economy by providing enterprises with a mobile extension for their legacy systems and by offering a self-serve set of products and APIs for marketplaces and developers. Businesses rely on Dispatch to enable their customers to instantly find and book a scheduled or immediate service either online or through a smartphone, and allow the customer to track the arrival of their provider in real-time.
“Customers want a seamless experience that enables them to book immediately, know exactly when their service professional is going to arrive and then pay with ease,” said Avi Goldberg, co-founder and CEO, Dispatch. “We are positioned to become the underlying infrastructure that links these consumers and the on-demand economy with legacy businesses and startups.”
Since 2012, more than $2.5B in venture investment has been made into the on-demand services market, while legacy companies struggle to upgrade old systems to address their customers’ needs.
“Dispatch has a profound opportunity to ‘uberfy’ legacy businesses, bringing them into the on-demand economy and providing visibility into the long elusive ‘last mile’ of customer engagement,” said Ray Lane. “Dispatch has the team and the technology in place to successfully address this big market opportunity.”
Enabling the Infrastructure for the On-Demand Economy
One of the first markets that Dispatch is reshaping is the $450B home services industry. The industry’s 1.2 million service providers have long struggled with improving customer satisfaction. The era of 4-hour appointment windows during a time when consumers expect push-button experiences is no longer viable. Handyman Connection, an early Dispatch customer, recognized this gap between evolving market trends and its impact on customer satisfaction and turned to Dispatch to address it.
“We have an exceptional network of home repair professionals, but wanted to provide our customers with greater ease in scheduling and to significantly reduce the wait times so they don’t have to sit around half the day waiting for someone to show up,” said Jeff Wall, president and CEO, Handyman Connection. “Dispatch’s service will help us create a much better customer experience.”
Dispatch is the only platform that addresses both markets, powering on-demand services for:
- Enterprise Businesses: Legacy businesses in the services industry have struggled to modernize and improve customer service. The increasing use of contractors, combined with antiquated back-office and workforce management solutions, results in poor customer communication, unreliable service, and little visibility into service performance. Dispatch easily integrates with back-office systems, providing a mobile-extension of CRM, ERP or workforce management solutions to give visibility into the availability and performance of contractors, employees and their broader network of service providers. As a result, legacy businesses can provide customers with the experience they expect – real-time scheduling and arrival tracking at the touch of a button.
- Startups, Developers and Technology Entrepreneurs: For developers and startups building on-demand or “Uber-for-X” services with limited resources, building the technology infrastructure to support and scale the business can be a significant strain on growth. By leveraging Dispatch’s APIs, SDKs and web and mobile clients, these companies can focus on building the best customer experience without worrying about internal tools or scaling their backend. Dispatch helps bring great ideas to life.
For more information, please visit: www.dispatch.me
About Dispatch
Dispatch has created the platform to bring businesses into the on-demand economy. Dispatch provides enterprises with a mobile extension for their existing systems and offers a self-serve set of products and APIs for marketplaces and developers. Businesses rely on Dispatch to enable their customers to instantly find and book a scheduled or immediate service either online or through a smartphone, and allow the customer to track the arrival of their provider in real-time. For more information, please visit www.dispatch.me.
