TaskRabbit is exploring a sale after the company received inbound interest from a strategic buyer, CEO Stacy Brown-Philpot confirmed.
TaskRabbit is looking into selling itself
The gig economy startup has hired advisers after a possible purchaser surfaced during a recent funding process.
“It’s opportunistic,” said Brown-Philpot in a brief interview, in which she declined to provide more details about the process. There is now more than one buyer interested, said sources.
Recode had contacted the company after hearing of the talks from sources, as well as a hiring of Bank of America Merrill Lynch as advisers, which came as the San Francisco-based on-demand chore service was in the process of raising another round of funding.
The company has raised close to $38 million so far, from venture firms like Shasta Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Founders Fund. Sources said it did another small financing last year from an international investor.
That’s all to continue its expansion of cities in the U.S. to 40 from its current 24 locations. In a Recode Decode podcast last September, Brown-Philpot said the company has been growing quickly and has struck a number of partnerships, such as with furniture giant Ikea. She also noted it is cash flow positive in its cities, and close to reaching profitability overall.
TaskRabbit is one of the best-known startups in the so-called “gig” economy that links freelance workers with jobs, from handymen to movers to assistants. It has 60 employees, but scores of independent workers use its platform.
Brown-Philpot, a former Google exec and a board member at HP Inc., took over the top job at TaskRabbit from founder Leah Busque exactly a year ago. She is one of the few African-American women CEOs in tech and spoke about that too in the podcast interview.
“I have been ‘the only’ for most of my career. I walk into a room, there’s one or two black women. There aren’t that many, because the pipeline of talent just isn’t there,” she said. “I know we overuse that word, but the fact of the matter is, when I go home to Detroit, there are people who don’t know that they could become the CEO of a tech company.”
You can hear the rest of the interview I did with her below:
And here is Brown-Philpot’s interview with Recode’s Johana Bhuiyan at Code Enterprise last year:
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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