$22.5M Series A Funding, a Long Way From Carrying Concrete

Eamonn O'Rourke
Nov 4 · 6 min read
Unsplash/Sylvia Zhou

I read this book as a teenager called It’s a Long Way From Penny Apples by Bill Cullen. It stuck with me because the author grew up inside inner-city of Dublin not far from where I grew up. His family sold fruits and vegetables on the streets to make ends meet, yet he wound up being one of Ireland’s most successful businessmen, owning among other things, the largest number of car dealerships in the country. I was enormously inspired by the perseverance that drove him to rise above the surroundings he was brought up in and build his dream.

Now over 20 years later, my co-founders and I have just raised 22.5M in our Series A, to build our dream of making professional builders live’s easier.

I’m not a writer, but I’m Irish, so I do love a good story. This is my story about how I went from carrying concrete on building sites for my father in Dublin to building RenoRun in Montreal, Toronto and Austin (so far).

I worked my way up the ladder in the construction business. From sweeping floors to finish carpentry, and everything in between. The days were always long and at least 30% of my time was spent pricing and ordering materials. As I moved through my career, I moved into project management in Europe, Australia and Canada and eventually moved into development.

Mixing Technology with Construction

As a Business Owner, I was leveraging every technology platform available to make my business and my life more efficient. It made a noticeable difference. I was churning out estimates and prices faster and managing my projects with a lot more sophistication than my competitors. I had the edge of an early tech adopter, but the industry still had tons of problems.

Today a lot more contractors have started adopted technology, but other problems come into play like the rising labor shortage. There aren’t enough people to do the actual construction work. Everyone is looking for how they can be more efficient elsewhere, like in the planning and procurement. For every 4 construction workers retiring, only one new generation worker takes their place, so we’re seeing a 4:1 loss in workforce. In 2015 I joined that ratio and stepped away from the construction industry.

It’s funny, because like a bad relationship, it wasn’t until I left the construction industry that it became apparent just how many things needed to be improved. I knew that technology could help eliminate the massive inefficiency around materials procurement in the construction and renovation industry. The problem is that I didn’t believe that a guy like me could start a tech company and succeed at solving these problems. I spent some time in California exploring an investment in a high-end wood furniture company and while there, met a non-technical founder who was solving problems in the industry that he came from. It was the first time that I truly realized that you didn’t need to be a software developer to start a technology company.

Armed with the seeds of what would become RenoRun, I headed back to Canada. During that drive my wife and I created what would become the initial business plan. As a voracious reader, I started to do my research and grabbed every book about Amazon, Uber and any other successful startup I could find.

Getting Scrappy and Seeding Growth

Before building out the concept, the other Co-Founders and I would sit in different hardware store parking lots around Montreal in the winter, with Tim Hortons coffees and notebooks. We’d hand-count anyone going out in with work-boots and a van or pickup truck and compare notes at the end of the day. This was our “customer”. Then we started doing phantom material runs. We’d text each other an order then “pick it” at hardware store and put it on the cart, then put it back on the shelf because we weren’t actually buying and loading the materials at that point. Then we’d drive to the address to see how fast we could do it. We were the definition of scrappy.

From there I treated RenoRun like a construction project. First defining the scope of the company, then mapping out wireframes for the mobile application like project blueprints or plans. My team and I went on to build a minimally viable product from our scrappy research.

I knew the construction industry was all about relationships, so I set out to build a recognizable brand. Contractors aren’t used to delightful customer experiences, so I wanted to make every day better for them, right down to the free coffee included.

Although I’d built out the concept for a company that would change the way contractors plan, price and procure materials, I felt like I had a lot of catching up to do in the startup world. I went out 3–4 nights every week networking at every startup and tech event in the city.

I realized that one of Canada’s largest early stage VC firms, Real Ventures, was in my backyard. After an intro with one of the founding partners, Alan McIntosh, he very graciously had coffee with me. I told him what we were building and “we’re not raising money now, but I want you to know who we are for when that time comes.” A year later I got an email out of the blue from Sam Haffar, another partner at the firm, saying how he kept hearing about RenoRun. He was mid-home renovation at the time and our vans kept pulling up to his house! As BetaKit wrote “It can be hard for early-stage startups to attract the attention of VCs. It becomes much easier when your company’s delivery trucks start showing up at their house.”

Sam and I sat down and a half-hour meeting turned into a two-hour meeting. I had a clear vision of where I wanted to take the company and luckily he got it right away. We were almost finishing each other’s sentences. Aligning with our investors and knowing they also understand the market and how we want to attack it, was, and still is really important for us.

We had been operating on capital invested by my co-founders and funds that we raised from friends and family up until we closed a $3M seed investment from Real Ventures and ScaleUp Ventures (SUV). That wasn’t that long ago, we only announced it in February this year. Now fast-forward to November and we’ve just closed a $22.5M Series A round with investments from Obvious Ventures, iNovia Capital and Maple Ventures as well as all of our existing investors.

Looking Back on Leaps and Bounds

If you told me 10 years ago that I’d be spending time in Silicon Valley speaking to some of the biggest investors in the world, having already raised almost $30M, I would have laughed. It really does astound me sometimes when I think how far I’ve come. To anyone who is holding back from making their dreams happen, you aren’t getting any younger and you’ll only have more to lose in the future. This is my 5th company. Some were successful and some were not, but I’ve always learned from my mistakes. I was lucky enough to learn while I was young and the implications were less. Now I know that anyone can have a good idea in the shower, but what makes the difference is the ability to follow through and actually build the house from the blueprint.

Eamonn O’Rourke, Co-Founder and CEO of RenoRun

Eamonn O’Rourke is a seasoned builder and serial entrepreneur with more than 20 years of construction industry experience under his tool belt. He has built houses in Europe and North America, managing more than $45M in construction projects across the globe. With a world-class team under his leadership,

Eamonn’s new focus is building technology to reshape the industry he came from with his company RenoRun.

Eamonn O'Rourke

Written by

I’m a serial entrepreneur and CEO of RenoRun, building the world’s largest single source platform for builders and general contractors.

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