Umang Dua is an alum of Doon School.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DCV: Handybook – a start-up service based in New York City that provides on-demand home cleaning services to its clients, and which is co-founded by Indian American entrepreneur Umang Dua – just raised $30 million in venture funding during a Series B investment round.
That round was led by Revolution Growth, a fund that is operated by Steve Case. That raises the company’s total fundraising to around $49 million, reports Forbes, and puts the company well on the path to growing even more than it already has in a very short amount of time.
Dua founded the company with Oisin Hanrahan, his classmate and roommate while studying at Harvard Business School in 2012. The two became fixated on starting a company together, and began pitching ideas to each other for what would make the best idea. When the two looked around at how they were living – let’s face it, the years spent living in college are not the cleanest – the idea for Handybook hit them.
The idea for Handybook is simple – clients call and schedule a home cleaning, and a certified professional that works directly for Handybook comes and performs the service. These cleanings can be booked over the phone or online, and can be done in as little as 60 seconds, says the company website. Cleanings can even be scheduled for the very next day, and customer service is available 24/7.
The company was accepted into the prestigious Highland Capital start-up incubator in the summer of 2012, and hit the ground running by the end of that year. Now, the company employs 150 workers in 26 cities across the country, and even purchased a west coast cleaning company called Exec for a little under $10 million in the winter of 2013.
Dua is originally from India, and is the son of Ajay Dua, the former Secretary in India’s ministry of Industry and Commerce. He studied at The Doon School before going to the University of Oxford, where he earned his B.A. in Economics and Political Science. He also holds a B.A. in the same fields from Amherst College, according to his LinkedIn, and earned his M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.
Before devoting himself full-time to Handybook, he was a business analyst at McKinsey & Company from 2010-2011, and also co-founded a company called College Connect, which is “an online platform that connect college and business school applicants with enrolled students.”