Dolly, the “hey, can you help me move my couch?”, moving app raises $1.7M

by Garrett Reim
December 12, 2014
Dolly, the Uber-like app of “hey, can you help me move my couch?” has just raised $1.7 million in seed funding. The company has been beta testing in Chicago for the last four months and now will also be launching formally. The seed round was raised from Hyde Park Venture Partners, KGC Capital and angel investors Jeff Wilke, Bill Wolf, Terry Diamond, Ben Elowitz, Kim Rachmeler and Edward Yim.
 
“We are fortunate to have such a world-class roster of investors with deep expertise in collaborative marketplaces and logistics to help us execute our aggressive growth plans,” said Mike Howell, CEO and co-founder in a statement. “As we build out our team with additional roles in operations, marketing, business development and engineering, we will be able to accelerate our product roadmap and offer additional services such as moving protection insurance.”  
 

On Dolly’s app and website users post moving jobs, like moving furniture or the contents of whole apartments, and wait for a network of drivers, also called “Helpers,” to respond. Drivers on Dolly use their own vehicles, lift the objects themselves, are background checked, insured and rated on the app. Dolly suggest prices for each job using an algorithm that considers the qualities of the job like the type and number of items, the moving environment, and distance traveled. The company said moving jobs typically range in price from $50 to $85.

 
Dolly is part of an ever-growing wave of on demand-everything. Companies like Dolly are moving people from ordering services via phone calls to ordering by just pressing a few buttons on their phone. Dolly’s marketplace of labor and trucks for hire also makes it part of the sharing economy. Sharing companies Dolly, Uber and AirBn’B tend to first cluster around cities where the concentration of unused things and labor are great and the need to hire services is in high demand. Dolly plans to use its new funding to expand to other cities in 2015, so expect to see it in places like Chicago, where car ownership, and especially truck ownership, is sparse.  
 
Dolly is also planning to use its $1.7 million seed capital to improve its app, increase hiring, and grow app usage in Chicago.
 
 
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