Investment Notes #6 - Tradify

Investment Notes #6 – Tradify

We are excited to announce Movac Fund 5’s sixth investment – Tradify. Movac is leading the $10m Series B alongside existing investors K1W1 and IceHouse Ventures, with the deal being a Growth-stage investment allocation.

Tradify is software that empowers tradespeople, offering a mobile-first app that simplifies quoting, scheduling, invoicing, and payments for trades businesses. It was founded in 2010 by then-tradie Curtis Bailey.

Pen and paper

Many tradespeople still rely on pen and paper to do business. This means significant time spent on admin and a higher risk of a poor customer experience. But the industry is modernising; customer expectations around engagement are increasing, a new generation of technology-led tradespeople are looking to work smarter and governments are demanding transparency in the ‘cash economy’.

Tradify lets tradespeople do the tasks they need to do quickly and with low friction – quoting, invoicing, scheduling and even taking payments – letting them get back to the real work.

So what’s the plan now?

While Covid caused significant economic hardship across the world, it has accelerated many businesses long term plans to go digital. Tradify has benefited from this with surging demand in Australia, New Zealand and its most recent target market – the UK. The company has industry-leading customer satisfaction scores and is focused on building features customers want while keeping the product as easy to use as possible. This has enabled it to get cut-through in what is an immature but still competitive market.

Tradify is raising money to build out its product development, sales and customer success teams. It has exceptional sales efficiency, demonstrating to us the time is right to invest.

We are particularly excited about the product innovation enabled by Tradify’s payments technology and are looking forward to seeing how this plays out.

Adding some SaaS to the portfolio

Tradify has a Software-as-a-Service business model and is growing over 40% year on year. While near breakeven now, we are investing to accelerate growth in a rapidly increasing market opportunity post-Covid.

We think Tradify fills an important slot from a Fund 5 portfolio allocation perspective and are thankful to have the company join us this early in the lifecycle of the Fund.

We are looking forward to applying what we have learnt to help NZ SaaS companies compete on the world stage, with Fund 4 portfolio companies Vend, Unleashed and Timely offering valuable lessons.

Thanks to the founder Curtis, the chair Adam and CEO Michael for partnering with us on this journey.

www.tradifyhq.com