- Home Depot Inc (NYSE: HD) has announced Home Depot Ventures, a venture capital fund created to identify, fund, and partner with early-stage companies. These are the details.
Home Depot Inc (NYSE: HD) announced Home Depot Ventures, a venture capital fund created to identify, fund, and partner with early-stage companies to accelerate emerging technologies that aim to improve the customer experience and shape the future of home improvement. And the $150 million fund aims to invest in companies that advance The Home Depot’s ability to provide a seamless interconnected shopping experience, develop new and differentiated capabilities, and extend its low-cost provider position to:
1.) Better Serve Customers:
a.) Simplify how people invest in their homes throughout the milestones of homeownership, including initial purchase and move-in, ongoing maintenance and repairs, and renovations or remodels
b.) Evolve how professional customers efficiently manage and grow their businesses, saving them time and money
2.) Better Serve Associates:
Improve the lives of Home Depot associates and enable them to collaborate more safely, easily, and efficiently to meet the rapidly changing expectations of customers
3.) Deliver Operational Excellence:
a.) Drive operational excellence to continue to deliver value for customers, including platform innovation, delivery optimization, asset, and network optimization, and the application of data science
This fund will consider investment opportunities in businesses at various stages of development with an emphasis on early and growth-stage companies that solve challenges for The Home Depot’s customers and show potential to scale. And Home Depot Ventures will serve as a valuable partner by providing growing companies with direct access to the expertise and expansive footprint of the broader enterprise.
Home Depot Ventures builds on a successful history of investments in startups, which have delivered consistently strong returns and business partnerships. And investments include Afero, a secure, end-to-end Internet of Things (IoT) platform to provide smart capabilities for products in virtually any industry; Loadsmart, a freight technology company designed to help shippers and carriers price, book, and move freight more efficiently; Made Renovation, an end-to-end digital platform for bathroom renovations; and Roadie, a crowdsourced delivery platform that enables same-day delivery to more than 20,000 zip codes nationwide, which was acquired by UPS in 2021.
KEY QUOTES:
“With Home Depot Ventures, we’re lending our support and expertise to enable rapid scale of innovation. This is an exciting opportunity to find and scale the next big ideas in technology and retail.”
– Richard McPhail, executive vice president and chief financial officer of The Home Depot
