To incubate useful new ideas emerging outside the company, The Home Depot has created a venture capital fund focused on identifying, financing and partnering with growing early-stage companies to accelerate emerging technologies that can improve its customer experience and shape home improvement’s future.
- Simplify how people invest in their homes throughout the milestones of ownership, from initial purchase and move-in through ongoing maintenance and repairs to renovations and remodels.
- Help professional customers efficiently manage and grow their businesses, so saving time and money.
- Improve the lives of Home Depot associates and enable them to more safely collaborate and easily and efficiently meet the rapidly changing expectations of customers.
- Drive operational excellence in delivering value for customers via platform innovation, delivery optimization, asset and network optimization, and the application of data science.
The fund will consider investment opportunities in businesses at various stages of development, Home Depot stated, with an emphasis on early and growth-stage companies that solve challenges for the company’s customers and demonstrate potential to scale. Among the functions of Home Depot Ventures is to partner with collaborating enterprises and provide them with direct access to the expertise and expansive footprint of the broader operation.
Home Depot is building on a successful history of investments in startups with the Ventures initiative, the company noted. Startup investments have delivered consistently strong returns and business partnerships, it added. Investments have included Afero, a secure, end-to-end Internet of Things platform developed to provide smart capabilities for products in virtually any industry They also include 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 UPS acquired in 2021.
“With Home Depot Ventures, we’re lending our support and expertise to enable rapid scale of innovation,” said Richard McPhail, Home Depot executive vp and CFO, in announcing the initiative. “This is an exciting opportunity to find and scale the next big ideas in technology and retail.”
