GoButler Goes Beyond Beta, Gets $8M Financing

GoButler, the startup that pairs text messaging with personal services, has raised $8 million in Series A financing.

TechCrunch reported Thursday (July 30) that the company has also moved beyond beta testing of its service, which now is available internationally in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Austria and Switzerland.

The use the service, customers send a text message with a request for a good or service – and then GoButler delivers the request within a few hours.

In reference to the funding, TechCrunch reported that the financing was led by General Catalyst Partners, with additional commitments by Lakestar, Slow Ventures, BoxGroup, Cherry Ventures, and Sound Ventures (which in turn have Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary as founders). The company added that Joel Cutler, of General Catalyst, has joined the GoButler board.

Of particular note is the fact that GoButler’s founders have been ex-executives from another investor in the Series A, Rocket Internet (which invested through its Global Founders Capital).

GoButler has said that its service, which launched earlier in 2015, has been used by more than 100,000 individuals and has processed more than 1 million requests. The service is free.

In an interview with TechCrunch, co-founder and chief executive officer Navid Hadzaad said that aside from the “Heroes” component of the service (who are in turn GoButler staffers), the company has been automating its technology. Upon launch, the executive said “99 percent of what we were doing was manual.” Now the technology has been augmented to automate responses and push requests to the proper GoButler employees.

And in his remarks to TechCrunch, Hadzaad said the service will remain free, while the company will look to use customer data to build “more of an ad network around [GoButler].” Another option would be to adopt an affiliate model, in which the company would get a cut of business that is driven to other places.

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