iFixng.com, an online marketplace for hiring handymen and artisans, has raised $50,000 seed funding from Yomi Martins, a non-institutional private investor.
Okonkwo Gerald, founder as well as CEO, confirmed to Techpoint that the deal was signed off last month, specifically on the 21st of March 2018. But they only deem it fit to announce now.
According to him, the fund raised will serve three major purposes; grow the number of handymen and artisans currently signed up on the platform, grow customer and user base and expand services beyond Lagos to Abuja.
"This is a step in the right direction. We believe it's time to increase our customer and artisan base to enable us extend our services to individuals across boards who find it extremely difficult to find these handymen for repairs or installations in Lagos and other cities subsequently,” Gerald told Techpoint.
In order to increase the number of handymen on its platform, iFixng hopes to partner with recharge card vendors, to drive more registration, and other channels to reduce the response rate from 4 hours to below 2 hours.
Launched in September, 2016, iFixng was in beta testing for a while but having processed over 200 jobs since it became publicly available, “we felt it's time to grow the company,” says Gerald.
Currently, the number of artisans and handymen registered on iFixng stands at 313. It has also garnered over 500 signed up users.
“We've successfully partnered with Heritage Bank to bank all unbanked artisans during our process of on-boarding,” Gerald adds.
Through the partnership, iFixng now claims to also provide financial inclusion services to all who register on its platform while also partnering with MI Education, a leading handyman training school in Australia, to provide Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) certifications and training for its handymen.
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