History
The company was founded as RunMyErrand in Boston in 2008, during the Great Recession, by Leah Busque, a former software engineer for IBM. [3] [7] She got the idea to start the company when she needed dog food but didn’t have time to get it herself. [8] [9]
In 2009, the company received funding from Facebook's startup incubator, fbFund, and Tim Ferriss became an advisor. [10] [8]
The firm raised $1.8 million in seed money from angel investors. [11]
In April 2010, the name of the company was changed from RunMyErrand to TaskRabbit. [12]
In June 2010, the company moved its headquarters to San Francisco. [13]
In May 2011, TaskRabbit raised a $5 million Series A financing round from Shasta Ventures, First Round Capital, Baseline Ventures, Floodgate Fund, Collaborative Fund, 500 Startups, and Lisa Gansky. [14] [11] [2]
In July 2011, TaskRabbit launched a mobile app for iOS. [15] [16] [17] [18] At that time, the company had 1,500 active taskers. [13]
In October 2011, Eric Grosse, the co-founder and former president of Hotwire.com, was named CEO. [19] [20] At that time, the company had operations in Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City; Chicago; Los Angeles; and Orange County, California. [21] [22]
In December 2011, Taskrabbit received an additional $17.8 million in a Series B round of funding from existing investors as well as Lightspeed Venture Partners, Allen & Company, and The Tornante Company. It also engaged Michael Eisner as an advisor. [11] [23] [24] At the time, the firm had 35 employees and generated $4 million in business each month. [2] [25]
In June 2012, Busque reassumed the role of CEO, with Gross staying on with the company's board of directors, advising on strategy and operations. [26]
In July 2012, the company raised $13 million in funding, bringing its total funding to $37.5 million. [27]
In January 2013, the company hired Stacy Brown-Philpot, formerly of Google, as the company's first COO. [28] [29]
In March 2013, "Taskrabbit Business" was launched. It allowed businesses to hire temporary workers from the Taskrabbit users, with a 26% commission. [30]
In November 2013, the company launched in London, its first international market. [31] Because of declines both in bids and in completed and accepted tasks in the U.S., the company chose to test a new system in London whereby Taskers set their own rates and schedules, and when a new job was posted that matched their profile, the platform would send them an alert. The first to respond got the job. [9] [5] [32] In London, the results were positive: almost all the company's metrics improved, and the average amount of money that individual Taskers on the platform were taking home increased. [5]
In June and July 2014, TaskRabbit began implementing this new format in all markets. [33] The new format was met with significant backlash from the Tasker community. [34] [35] Taskrabbit incorporated some of the feedback into an updated version of its app that launched in January 2015. [34] In 2014, Taskrabbit received 4,000 applications to be a tasker; it received 15,000 applications in 2015. [5]
In April 2016, Stacy Brown-Philpot was promoted from chief operating officer to CEO and founder and former CEO Leah Busque became executive chairwoman. [36] [37] [38] [39]
By January 2017, the company had 55,000 active taskers. [40]
In September 2017, the company was acquired by an affiliate of IKEA. [41] [42] [43] [44] [45]
In February 2018, TaskRabbit began operations in Birmingham, Bristol, and Manchester. [46]
In March 2018, IKEA launched a furniture assembly service from Taskrabbit in the U.S. [47] [48] [49] [50]
In April 2018, the company was affected by a data breach. At that time it had 1.5 million users and 60,000 taskers. [51] [52] [53] [54]
In September 2018, Taskrabbit expanded to Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, and other Canadian cities. [55] [56]
In December 2018, the company launched operations in Brighton, Cardiff, Coventry, Liverpool, Warrington, Oxford, and Reading. [57] [58]
In September 2019, TaskRabbit launched service in Paris and followed it with a rollout to other French cities. [59] [60]
In October 2019, the company launched in Germany, with operations in Berlin, Bochum, Cologne, Dortmund, Duisburg, Düsseldorf, Essen, Gelsenkirchen, Krefeld, Monchengladbach, Oberhausen, Wuppertal and the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region. [61]
In January 2020, Taskrabbit launched service in 39 cities in Spain. [62]
In August 2020, Brown-Philpot resigned as CEO. [63] Taskrabbit named Ania Smith, formerly of Walmart, Expedia, Airbnb, and UberEats, its new CEO. [64] [65] [66] [67]
In November 2020, the company launched service in Portugal, with operations in Lisbon, Porto, Braga, Coimbra, and Faro. [68]
In March 2021, Taskrabbit launched in Italy in Rome and Milan. [69]
In May 2022, TaskRabbit launched a global brand refresh, introducing an all lower-case wordmark with two different "a" characters. The company also removed the image of the "rabbit" from its logo and updated its default brand colors. [70] [71] [72]
In May 2022, TaskRabbit announced that it would close its physical offices, including its San Francisco, California headquarters, and transition to becoming a distributed company, with all employees engaging in remote work. [73] [74]
In July 2022, Taskrabbit launched service in Monaco. [75]
