Harvard Business School-spun Alfred announced Tuesday it's raised $2 million to help more busy Boston and New York City professionals master their to-do list.
The round was led by Spark Capital, and joined by SV Angel and CrunchFund. With the newfound financing, Alfred is expected to grow its engineering team to really hone in on its customer experience by using data to better anticipate needs.
"We've spent a lot of time investing in IP, in vetting service professionals on a real time basis — and a lot on last meter logistics, cluster analysis and optimizing scheduling," said Alfred Co-founder and CEO Marcela Sapone in an email to BostInno. "We think about ourselves as being a connective platform that brings the very best services to your door in a seamless way."
Alfred launched in 2013 when Sapone and Jessica Beck were MBA candidates at Harvard Business School. The duo, along with three other students, attempted to spend their spring break building five startups in five days under the umbrella of another venture Sapone and Beck were working on: WHITESPACE, "the first vertically integrated VC." Meaning, if the two were going to invest in a company, they were going to help build it themselves.
Alfred initially debuted as a portfolio product of WHITESPACE, which is still alive and well, but not where Sapone and Beck's current focus is. Rather, the two are pouring their energy into Alfred, a startup taking care of busy professionals' errand running, bill paying, grocery shopping, tailoring and more.
Named after the tireless valet, assistant and butler of Bruce Wayne, Alfred works neighborhood by neighborhood, visiting subscribers on set days to manage their weekly chores. The startup currently uses an internal mobile app to operate its back-end system, which gives "Alfreds" access to their routes and allows them to save tips about their clients' routines and preferences.
Come 2015, however, the team plans to launch a consumer-facing app. With the app, customers will be able to leave instructions, share shopping lists or notify their Alfreds of any changes to their daily routine.
Rather than provide on-demand care like the TaskRabbits and Handys of the world, Alfred is meant to run seamlessly and automatically in the background of customers' lives. The service, currently offered on an invite-only basis in Boston and New York, rings in at $99 a month, and is intended to give individuals back their most valuable resource: time.
During its six-month beta test, Alfred is said to have given back nearly 10,000 hours to busy families, entrepreneurs and young professionals. The startup made more than 8,000 runs, that included dry cleaning 21,600 shirts, delivering 1,478 pounds of dog food and placing 480 flowers in homes.
"I am proud to be an investor in Alfred," said Spark Capital General Partner Bijan Sabet in a statement. "I admire the founders' passion and commitment in delivering an amazing experience for customers. While on-demand services are great, Alfred goes beyond demand, providing a true service to automatically keep your home and life organized."
“If you long to come home to fresh groceries in your fridge, dry cleaning hanging in your closet and the shoes that didn't fit finally returned, then Alfred is the service for you."
On the other end, Alfred is offering full-time employment and benefits to its employees, a welcome alternative to the contract work typically offered by other companies in the sharing economy.
The concept gained quick traction. Following its launch, Alfred won the first-place, $50,000 prize in the business track of Harvard Business School's 2014 New Venture Competition. Roughly five months later, the team received an additional $50,000 after beating 26 other startups at TechCrunch Disrupt.
Alfred has since moved its headquarters from Boston to Union Square in New York City, given how good of a fit the service is for the busy New Yorker.
"We want to make the service as accessible as possible and that means being in more than one city," Sapone said. "We are growing Boston and New York at the same time, but the majority of our team sits in New York City, because it's a bigger market and also has a bigger startup hiring pool."
At the end of the day, at least Bostonians still get the perks of better managing their daily to-do list. As Sapone shared, “If you long to come home to fresh groceries in your fridge, dry cleaning hanging in your closet and the shoes that didn't fit finally returned, then Alfred is the service for you."
And who doesn't like the sounds of that?
Image via Alfred and Emma Toshack
