Sydney based odd job outsourcer, Airtasker, has acquired its Melbourne rival, Occasional Butler, as it looks to expand its operations overseas.
Airtasker now has 130,000 community members across Australia and an annual task run rate of over $4 million.
Airtasker is a trusted community marketplace for people to outsource tasks, find local services or complete flexible jobs to earn money – online or via mobile.
Launched in February 2012 as one of the pioneers of the “collaborative consumption” movement in Australia, Airtasker is the creation of Sydney Web entrepreneurs Tim Fung and Jonathan Lui.
The company is now exploring international opportunities and executives have spent significant time in New York in recent months.
Its on-demand army of skilled workers have been called on to do everything from standing in a six hour queue, for the Game of Thrones exhibition, to delivering Gelato Messina cakes to hungry office workers.
A Sydney surgeon used an Airtasker to fly to the US and pick up an engagement ring.
Occasional Butler was founded in 2012 by Erz and Jodie Imam, who have built a large community of thousands of people helping each other get things done.
They will now join Airtasker as community development advisors.
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Jodie Imam said, after meeting with Airtasker, we realised that we shared a parallel vision of how a services marketplace should grow and we quickly found we could create an even better customer experience by forming one big marketplace across Australia
“We’re really excited to join forces with the Airtasker team and will continue to be involved in marketplace development as Community Advisors,” she said.
Airtasker co-founder and CEO, Tim Fung, said the acquisition of Occasional Butler would help the company’s mission to build Australia’s number one services marketplace.
“Erz and Jodie did an amazing job of building traction in some of our key task verticals and hey have particularly built an incredibly vibrant community in Melbourne for people and businesses to outsource tasks,” he said.
The acquisition follows a previous acquisition by Airtasker of rival TaskBox in February 2013.
The household services sector accounts for about a fifth of Australia’s output and employs about a third of the population, according to the Reserve Bank of Australia.
Businesses can also use Airtasker to scale quickly by accessing a huge army of people all across Australia who can assist with jobs like market research, promotions or deliveries for an hour, a day, or a year.
Fung said companies such as TripAdvisor, EatNow, Delivery Hero and UberX have all used Airtasker to scale their workforce for store inspections, data collection and driver recruitment.
