ATLANTA, May 3, 2022
/PRNewswire/ -- The Home Depot® today announced Home
Depot Ventures, a venture capital fund created 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 $150 million 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:
Better Serve Customers:
- Simplify how people invest in their homes throughout the
meaningful milestones of home ownership, including initial purchase
and move-in, ongoing maintenance and repairs, and renovations or
remodels
- Evolve how professional (Pro) customers efficiently manage and
grow their businesses, saving them time and money
Better Serve Associates:
- Improve the lives of Home Depot associates and enable them to
collaborate more safely, easily and efficiently to meet the rapidly
changing expectations of customers
Deliver Operational Excellence:
- 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
"With Home Depot Ventures, we're lending our support and
expertise to enable rapid scale of innovation," said Richard McPhail, executive vice president and
chief financial officer of The Home Depot. "This is an exciting
opportunity to find and scale the next big ideas in technology and
retail."
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 successful history of
investments in startups, which have delivered consistently strong
returns and business partnerships. Investments include 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.
About The Home Depot
The Home Depot is the world's
largest home improvement specialty retailer. At the end of fiscal
year 2021, the company 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. The company employs approximately
500,000 associates. The Home Depot's stock is traded on the New
York Stock Exchange (NYSE: HD) and is included in the Dow Jones
industrial average and Standard & Poor's 500 index. The Home
Depot is #18 on the 2021 Fortune 500.
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SOURCE The Home Depot