I’ve had the same experience that Eden CEO and co-founder Joe Du Bey has had. I’ve spent large parts of my visits home trying to make my parents’ various computers, phones, printers and other tech devices work.
“It was not how I wanted to spend my Thanksgiving,” Du Bey told me Friday.
The world has become a much more technical place than it used to be, and many people, especially older folks, need help keeping up. “It’s ridiculous that we are living in this world where we are imprisoned by tech we have,” Du Bey told me.
Like many good startups, the idea for Eden was born out of personal experience. Du Bey says he tried to imagine Eden as the type of service he would like for his own parents.
Eden is like an “Apple Genius Bar on wheels,” Du f told me. The company employs a bunch of tech-savvy millennials (25 right now) and pays them $30 an hour to visit the homes of troubled tech users and do on-the-spot fixes.
Du Bey says a large number of the customers are Baby Boomers, but the service is available to anyone.
The Eden “tech wizards,” as they’re called, will fix any kind of home tech, including things like slow computers and broken printers. They can also install things like Nest cameras and other connected home devices. Du Bey says the most common service is providing smartphone screen replacements.
Most fixes cost $69 per hour with the first hour free. The smartphone screen fixes are different because they don’t take long to fix. So that’s a fixed price, depending on the type of phone. A house call to replace the screen on an iPhone 6 would cost $149, for example.
The company’s service is available throughout the Bey Area today. It’s proving the concept now, and hopes to scale up the service and add new cities a little later. Du Bey says the business has been growing more than 30 percent every week since it launched in May.
To keep the good times rolling, Eden has now raised a new $1.3 million funding round. The funding comes from Canvas Ventures, Eniac Ventures, Comcast Ventures, Maven Ventures, Y Combinator, and some angel investors.
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