Home Depot Launches $150M VC Fund to Fuel Retail and Home Improvement Innovation
The Home Depot has introduced Home Depot Ventures, a $150 million venture capital fund designed for early-stage companies aiming to improve the customer experience and shape the future of home improvement.
“With Home Depot Ventures, we’re lending our support and expertise to enable rapid scale of innovation,” said Richard McPhail, EVP and CFO at The Home Depot in a statement. “This is an exciting opportunity to find and scale the next big ideas in technology and retail.”
The fund will be on the lookout for companies with solutions that can:
- Better serve customers by simplifying how people invest in their homes through milestones of home ownership, ongoing maintenance and renovations/remodels, as well as evolving how professional customers efficiently manage and grow their businesses;
- Better serve associates to improve their lives and enable them to collaborate more safely, easily and efficiently to meet the rapidly changing expectations of customers; and
- Deliver operational excellence in areas such a platform innovation, delivery optimization, asset and network optimization and the application of data science.
Home Depot Ventures will continue the retailer’s history of startup investments, which include:
- Afero, a secure end-to-end IoT platform designed to provide smart capabilities for products in multiple industries;
- 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 enabling same-day delivery to more than 20,000 ZIP codes that was acquired by UPS in 2021.
