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RunMyErrand Inc. has secured a $1 million Series A round of equity financing from two West Coast firms, the company reports. It’s the first institutional investment for the Cambridge-based startup, which publishes a website allowing users to offer cash compensation for errands and other odd jobs.
Maples Investments and Baseline Ventures invested in RunMyErrand, which was founded in 2008 by CEO Leah Busque and has so far taken an undisclosed amount of equity from private investors.
Busque said the company plans to spend the funds hiring staff to build a bigger team in the Boston area and to expand to a new office in San Francisco. The company is currently seeking a general manager and a full-time engineer, she said.
RunMyErrand is currently live only in Boston, Cambridge and Brookline. The company, which is incubated out of Zipcar Inc.’s Cambridge’s offices, plans to pursue a neighborhood-based expansion strategy in San Francisco, similar to the way Zipcar has expanded the footprint of its web-based car-sharing service.
“We’ve learned a lot about how to launch in Boston,” Busque said. “This is actually a very hyperlocal model. We’ve learned a lot from the time we spent at Zipcar.”
Currently, the company has over 200 ‘runners’ in the Boston area. RunMyErrand takes applications, and vets participants in its runner program, Busque said. She declined to disclose how many users the company has posting jobs to the site.
RunMyErrand will remain close to break-even through this round of funding, Busque said, although the startup plans to hire aggressively.
Busque said RunMyErrand’s participation in Facebook Inc.’s fbFund REV incubator program this summer drew the interest of left-coast venture capital.
She said the company has no immediate plans to move out of its shared space at Zipcar headquarters.
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