We are excited to announce our investment in Dolly, where we participated in a $7.5M funding round alongside Unlock Venture Partners and Maveron.
Like other peer-to-peer marketplaces, Dolly connects people in need of services with people who are ready to provide them. Dolly’s app connects individuals and businesses with local truck owners (“helpers”) to move, deliver, or haul items.
Dolly is solely focused on delivering big and bulky items. Their fastest growing use case is furniture and other large item deliveries from big brand retailers like Lowes, Costco, and Big Lots!. Dolly gives retailers the ability to offer same day or scheduled delivery, while providing an elevated experience that allows the customer to pick the delivery time. Dolly is also an easy way to move furniture from one apartment to another, bring a dresser home from the flea market, or haul bulky items to Goodwill. You’ll never have to rent or borrow a truck again.
We are excited about this investment for several reasons…
- As we have seen in the ridesharing category, a marketplace that connects riders and drivers in a way that is a 10x better customer experience unlocks an incredible amount of dormant supply and demand. Dolly is that 10x better customer experience when it comes to on-demand moving help and furniture delivery. For example, Dolly offers a much tighter delivery window than many of the incumbent services — as early as 90 minutes out and you pick a 30 minute delivery window.
- Dolly is getting incredibly good feedback from their drivers and helpers. The platform gives individuals with trucks an easy opportunity to earn money in addition to their normal job. And there should always be a very healthy pool of helpers for Dolly considering that the top three best-selling vehicles in the U.S. in 2018 were all trucks.
- The company has already expanded to over ten cities and has perfected the playbook for geographical expansion.
Most importantly, we loved the vision that Mike Howell, Dolly’s co-founder and CEO, has for the company and the kind of world-class culture he has created. While this might be a later stage investment than what we usually do, we think there is tremendous potential here to build a multi-billion-dollar company.
