El Dorado Hills-based digital home maintenance platform HomeZada won the $250,000 top prize in the 2022 Wells Fargo Innovation Challenge this month in Palo Alto.
Wells Fargo & Co. started its innovation challenge in April this year, seeking companies reimagining financial services experiences into the future.
The contest had sought solutions in six general categories in finance, and HomeZada was able to make a case for at least three of the categories, said John Bodrozic, co-founder of the company.
“The home is the largest asset for most people,” he said, adding that most homeowners also tend to spend most of their income on the home.
HomeZada was founded in 2012, offering cloud-based home-inventory software and storage. The software began as a way for homeowners to inventory their homes for insurance purposes. It also provides a place to store warranties, receipts, photos, home-improvement data, building permits and other documents. It's also a secure digital trove that recommends routine maintenance and payments.
Customers use the cloud storage in all different ways, Bodrozic said. The needs of a homeowner in their 20s are different from a retired person. And the needs of customers in California are different from Florida or Minnesota.
All of them, however, can benefit from having a single cloud-accessed storage space for everything associated with the home.
HomeZada is private and doesn’t release revenues, Bodrozic said. It also doesn’t say how many customers it has, but it has for years had customers in all 50 states.
Bodrozic said the recent win helps validate what the company is doing.
Last month, HomeZada and Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co. struck a deal to give Nationwide's private client customers access to HomeZada's service at no charge. HomeZada is also in a pilot program with the AARP to help with wealth management and planning, Bodrozic said.
Winning contests is nothing new to HomeZada.
In 2020, Elizabeth Dodson, co-founder of HomeZada, won the $15,000 top cash prize in a pitch competition in New York City. The Female Founders in Tech 2019 contest was put on by Quesnay Inc. and presented by Wells Fargo (NYSE: WFC), Discover Financial Services (NYSE: DFS) and Equifax Inc. (NYSE: EFX) at the Nasdaq Stock Market's headquarters.
HomeZada won second place in the Sacramento Kings’ 2018 Capitalize startup competition, a pitch contest for local companies.
In 2014, HomeZada received a $2.1 million round of financing led by Folsom-based Moneta Ventures. That was the first outside investment HomeZada had taken since it launched.
