PRESS RELEASE FROM COMPANY: Today we're thrilled to announce some great news for our community of small businesses and consumers nationwide: Thumbtack has raised a $4.5 million Series A financing. We'll now be able to significantly accelerate our growth, simplifying more lives and connecting many more people with great local professionals.
Founded in 2009, Thumbtack is a community marketplace for you to list, discover and book local services. We make hiring a service professional as easy as it is to buy a book on Amazon.com.

This investment round was led by Javelin Venture Partners, with the additional participation of MHS Capital and Tim Draper. We are very excited to bring these great partners on board, and are already benefiting from their contributions.

Javelin's Managing Director, Jed Katz, has joined our Board. Katz is excited about the company - particularly about how big the opportunity is to transform the way people find and hire service professionals.

Thumbtack has seen dramatic growth over the last year. A few stats about us:
-- On average, a new user has signed up on Thumbtack every minute of every day for the last six months.
-- There are about half as many registered merchants on Thumbtack as there are claimed listings on Yelp (according to Yelp's S-1, they have 529,000 - there are 240,000 on Thumbtack).
-- Thumbtack is already bringing $40 million of new work to local businesses annually, and the number is expanding rapidly.
-- Thumbtack currently has a team of eight in San Francisco - we will be scaling our team rapidly, and we are hiring designers and developers. If you want to join an awesome team with a great culture that is on a path towards big success, check out the info below.

A consumer anywhere in the U.S. can post a free request for service on Thumbtack, and we'll bring them 3-5 bids on the job from qualified professionals to their email inbox within 24 hours. All kinds of local service professionals - like carpenters, wedding photographers, and Hindi tutors - are ready to respond to your request on our site.

The jobs on Thumbtack range from the small to the huge. A makeup artist from our site was hired to transform a few runners in San Francisco's Bay to Breakers race into the blue Na'vi people from Avatar. And last month, Thumbtack received its largest job request ever - for the full construction of a six-story apartment building in Manhattan.

Thumbtack has built this community in only two years, and we're extremely excited to hit the gas now that we have more resources.

The first thing we're doing with this money? Hiring!
We've built a solid foundation to create an enormous and amazing company - but we still have a long way to go, and the opportunities to harness your creativity and develop a beautiful product here remain almost limitless. We're currently hiring UX/UI designers, software engineers, and marketing rockstars. For the technical-minded among you, check out our engineering blog.