Airtasker’s Tim Fung to buy uni rivals’ Oneflare

Tim Fung knew Oneflare’s co-founders from university - he’s now buying them out.

Airtasker, led by Tim Fung and chaired by James Spenceley, have snapped up Oneflare. Picture: Ryan Osland

Airtasker boss Tim Fung has come full circle since his university days, acquiring Oneflare, a rival task marketplace co-founded by three of his university classmates.

Mr Fung on Wednesday announced plans to acquire Oneflare, currently Australia’s third largest services marketplace platform, in a deal worth $9.8m, funded by a fully underwritten $6.25m equity placement.

The $9.8m figure is a significant discount on Oneflare’s 2016 valuation of $43m, when it received a $15m investment from Fairfax’s Domain Group in exchange for 35 per cent equity in the business.

“I’ve known the founders of Oneflare, Adam, Marcus and Tommy, from back in university and we’d all started building similar businesses in terms of serving customers in the local services space,” Mr Fung said in an interview.

Tommy Lim, Marcus Lim and Adam Dong who established Oneflare at their office in Sydney’s CBD.

“We went about it in slightly different ways. Oneflare was going towards the direction of building a network for verified small businesses and Airtasker was creating a whole new marketplace built on the foundations of independent taskers.

“We had very similar culture and very similar missions, but we went about it in different ways. And I think now you know, that, that I’ve been speaking with Billy, the CEO of Oneflare, over the last few years, we started getting really excited about what we could do if we combined our marketplaces together.”

Airtasker will pay for the acquisition with $2.25m in cash, with the rest to be made up of Airtasker shares issued at 43c.

The company’s shares are down nearly 55 per cent over the past six months in what’s been a tough period of publicly listed tech stocks.

Mr Fung said the Oneflare acquisition would add 540,000 new customers to add to Airtasker’s 900,000 active customers.

“We think this will really strengthen the network effect, both market places will benefit from the increased scale, and there’ll be more opportunity for both customers and service professionals,” he said.

“Airtasker wants to help empower ‘Taskers’ to move up into higher value categories, like trades and home improvement, and that’s one Oneflare can be super valuable.

Oneflare CEO Billy Tucker. Picture: Supplied

“Over the next 18 to 24 months we have a really strong vision for having a singular Tasker marketplace, we will be integrating the best bits of Oneflare into the Tasker marketplace and have a singular customer experience,” Mr Fung said.

The executive said that wages on the Airtasker platform are continuing to climb, and that there were some positive opportunities to come out of Tuesday’s rate rise announcement for his business.

“With interest rates going up, I think there’s going to be more folks who want to be able to find a new way to earn money and I think flexible working is a great way to do that,” he said. “We absolutely need more folks who want to offer their skills on Airtasker and be service providers. So I definitely want to give a shout out to them.”