A startup set out to fight climate change — it did it by helping plumbers
The founders of HERO Software didn’t start out to help small tradespeople in construction. They started out to fight the climate crisis. But in doing so, they stumbled on a way to help the whole business. Now, the company has closed a €40 million Series B financing round, and plans to expand across Europe.
“I’m a member of the Green Party and did my PhD on solar,” co-founder Dr. Michael Kessler told TechCrunch via phone. “I looked at the best way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, such as via solar.”
“The building sector in Germany is responsible for a huge amount of carbon dioxide emissions. We wanted to quicken the energy transition in this sector and in Germany. It turned out that tradespeople were the bottleneck for the installation of solar cells or heat pumps,” he explained.
Kessler went on: “We founded the company to fight climate change by providing leads for tradespeople to do things like install heat pumps, and thus reduce carbon dioxide emissions from the building sector. That was our starting point. Later on, we realized we had a whole platform for tradespeople more generally.”
So, founded in Hanover in 2020 by Kessler and Philipp Lyding, HERO Software set out to make it easier for trade business owners and employees to install not just solar, but manage any kind of workflow, on and off site. So that’s plumbing, carpentry, photovoltaic installation and electrical services, you name it.
The platform now handles first customer contact, planning and execution of projects on-site, and the invoicing and payments, and now has 20,000 users in the DACH region.
Companies like Jobber (which has raised $183.5 million) and ServiceTitan (raised $1.5 billion) are best known as platforms on which tradespeople run their small businesses. But in Europe this is a far less tapped market, although it’s growing. German startup Plancraft recently completed a €12 million Series A.
Known as the platform for tradesmen SMEs in the German-speaking DACH (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) region, HERO’s financing round was led by Eight Roads Ventures, with existing investor Cusp Capital also participating again.
In a statement, Lucile Cornet, partner at Eight Roads Ventures said: “At Eight Roads we have witnessed many successful stories in Vertical SaaS, and HERO stands out for its comprehensive product and experienced team. We strongly believe that vertical SaaS will enable entire industries to become more digital and sustainably successful.”
HERO now plans to expand in Poland, France and the Netherlands: “France is maybe two, three years behind of Germany from a technology perspective. If you look at other markets in Europe, it’s a similar picture. Germany, Nordics and the U.K. are the exception,” Kessler said.
