We’ve seen services like Angie’s List and Red Beacon provide greater transparency around booking contractors and designers for home renovation and repair work, but that doesn’t mean there is no room for improvement in the space.
Sweeten, which just launched out of beta, has already done more than $100 million worth of renovation projects through its marketplace since June. The company allows users to post their renovation, decoration or repair jobs to the site and then posts that job to a handful of reviewed and qualified contractors, designers, etc.
Sweeten’s technology chooses these professionals based on a number of details, including project start date, cost estimate, location, style and project duration. If interested, those contractors can bid for the job and the top three to five matches are sent back to the user, offering a range of high, medium, and low options with reviews and ratings to make an informed decision.
The Sweeten marketplace has facilitated projects ranging from as low as a few thousand dollars up to $15 million for a single project. Sweeten takes between 1.75 percent and 3.75 percent per each transaction (from the contractor side), according to NY Business Journal.
It started when co-founder Jean Brownhill Lauer, even with experience in architecture and design, found it overly difficult to find the right contractors for her renovation project. She bootstrapped the project through a beta, and has now raised a total of $1.3 million from investors like Great Oaks Venture Capital, Joanne Wilson, Gotham Gal Ventures and Andrew Goszhardt, Jr.