ART – Airtasker Limited | Aussie Stock Forums

Airtasker cofounder and CEO Tim Fung is immensely proud of the fact his job services platform, which started on the web in 2012, helped remove 2000 spiders last year at about $35 a pop.

There’s no way that you could have posted a job for spider removal pre Airtasker, he says

He says there is no limit to the jobs that could exist on a marketplace platform such as Airtasker. Apart from spider removal, Fung says Airtasker’s taskers have facilitated these new services: flat pack furniture assembly, drone retrieval, date night planning and Halloween costume making.

Airtasker lists on the stock exchange on Monday, raising $84M at $0.65 a share and which values the company at $255 million. Investors have backed the stock, which is priced at nine times its forecast 2021 revenue, a relatively cheap valuation compared to other tech platforms. Airtasker became cash flow positive in May last year.

Airtasker chairman James Spenceley says the initial public offering was priced in order to “leave something on the table“. He says employees are true believers in the story, having subscribed for 10 times the amount of shares allocated to them.

Spenceley and Fung met in 2011 when it was a start-up in need of cash. Spenceley says Airtasker is the most exciting business he has been involved in notwithstanding his passion for Vocus, the telco he founded many years ago that is now being purchased by Macquarie Infrastructure and Real Assets.

Airtasker was founded by Fung and Jonathan Lui after Fung borrowed a friend’s chicken nuggets delivery truck to move some furniture to a new apartment.

“That little weekend of work just made us think, why is it that we ask friends and family to do all these kinds of jobs when there’s so many people out there under employed or unemployed?” he says. “We thought it was just crazy that you couldn’t call on someone in your local area and be able to just work with that person in a trusted way. That was really the genesis of starting Airtasker.

“We have seen the platform evolve from simple jobs like moving boxes or maybe doing a little bit of light gardening or something all the way up to now you’re seeing architects, tax consultants and lawyers”, Fung says. “From the tasker side of the equation, which is really where our mission stands, it’s really about creating jobs and income as the core purpose of what we do.

“I would differentiate ourselves from something like UBER or Deliveroo, which are really focused on getting the job done as cheaply as possible. .. And so really, the manifestation of that is simply to promise the local services. But at the heart of what Airtasker is doing is creating jobs for people, and primarily that is in Australia right now, but we think that is a problem that’s solvable on a global basis.”

The company is expanding into the United Kingdom, Ireland, Singapore and New Zealand.

Airtasker charges its taskers a service fee calculated as a percentage of the task value agreed between the customer and the tasker. Those taskers who complete higher value transactions are charged lower fees.