The Home Depot Launches $150M Venture Capital Fund
Summary
Home Depot Ventures aims to identify, fund and partner with early-stage companies to accelerate emerging technologies that aim to improve the customer experience and shape the future of home improvement. The fund aims to invest in companies that advance The Home Depot’s ability to provide a seamless interconnected shopping experience, develop new and differentiated capabilities, and extend its low-cost provider position to: • Simplify how people invest in their homes throughout home ownership, including initial purchase and move-in, ongoing maintenance and repairs, and renovations or remodels • Evolve how professional (Pro) customers manage and grow their businesses • Improve the lives of Home Depot associates and enable them to collaborate to meet the expectations of customers • Drive operational excellence to continue to deliver value for customers, including 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, with an emphasis on early and growth stage companies that solve challenges for The Home Depot’s customers and show potential to scale. Home Depot Ventures will serve as a valuable partner by providing growing companies with direct access to the expertise and expansive footprint of the broader enterprise. Home Depot Ventures builds on a history of investments in startups, including: • Afero, a secure, end-to-end Internet of Things (IoT) platform to provide smart capabilities for products in virtually any industry; • 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 was acquired by UPS in 2021. The Home Depot is a large home improvement specialty retailer, which, at the end of fiscal year 2021, operated a total of 2,317 retail stores in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, 10 Canadian provinces and Mexico.