Made raises $23M for bathroom renovations

With Roger Dickey (CEO) and Sagar Shah (COO) at the helm of its affairs, Made Renovation has recently announced that it raised funds of $23 million in a Series A round of funding.

This is the basic or first round of seed funding wherein third-party (angel) investors pump money as capital into new, promising start-ups. Insight Partners is the chief angel investor behind this fund and pre-existing investors – Felicis Ventures, Founders Fund and Base10 Partners.

Made Renovation offers full-stack bathroom renovation, by which they mean a start-to-finish logical process of designing, acquiring raw material and finally bringing the design to fruition. Made's USP is a certain eCommerce-like quality to its services; wherein it assumes responsibility for all aspects of bathroom remodeling from start to finish. Their client need not worry about sourcing materials from elsewhere and other such hassles.

Launched in 2019, it has had its share of challenges.
Initially, homeowners were not very comfortable with the idea of home remodeling. It was equally difficult to bag small projects with lesser margins which contractors would prefer. Difficult customers were something to counter on the way to growth, too.

Additionally, bathroom remodeling was overlooked as a not-very profitable area by the busy general contractors who had entire homes and (sometimes) even floors to remodel. Their work was more scalable and profitable. Renovation of the bathroom, a relatively small space, would be costly for the homeowner and less profitable for those carrying out the renovation. According to Roger Dickey, this situation is essentially a gap in supply versus demand – peoples' needs for remodeling of the bathroom were not quite fulfilled the way they would want.

Then the pandemic happened, and things started changing for the better.
With people at home more than ever before and having money as well as the time for looking after and improving upon their residences, the demand for home renovations gradually started building up. Last year with 4x business growth, was phenomenal for Made. Having started in San Fran, it has branched out in Los Angeles and Seattle too.

This noteworthy success story has its roots in this company offering an eCommerce-like quality to their services. By this is meant synchronization and integration of the many different aspects of remodeling so that the company or firm is a one-stop-shop or single-point contact for all that goes into the process. Basically, having chosen a particular design, the client can wash off their hands any further thought or action about the renovation. Everything else is taken care of by the remodeling/renovating company, Made Renovations.

Today, Made Renovations has approximately 100 building partners, which bring people's remodeling dreams to fruition. First, customers tell Made what exactly they want, and it offers them design options. Once a particular design is zeroed in on by the client, it is up to Made to do everything else. This 2- or 3-step simple process has attracted numerous clients over a less than a 2-year period.