Subscription lawn care startup Sunday just announced some major green.
The Boulder company announced on Wednesday that it raised $19 million to scale its “agtech for your backyard” platform, amid growing demand for its customized, non-toxic lawn care treatments. CEO Coulter Lewis credited Sunday’s boom in business to the COVID-19 pandemic, which he said has caused eco-conscious Millennials to move from cities to single-family homes in the suburbs, where they’re suddenly tasked with caring for their front lawn.
“Society has taught us that if you’re a man, or if you bought a house, you’re supposed to just know about how to care for your lawn and your property,” Lewis told Built In. “The reality is, that’s not how knowledge works.”
Prior to starting Sunday, Lewis operated Quinn Snacks with his wife, where he focused intently on where the natural food company’s ingredients came from, and how their products were grown. One day, a trip to the home improvement store left Lewis wondering what era the lawn care industry operated in — “There’s just an incredible over-application of pesticides and herbicides. Some of the most polluted land in the U.S. is in your backyard,” he said.
Lewis then realized there was no reason why Americans couldn’t implement the growing practices of Quinn Snacks’ organic farm suppliers in their own backyards.
“I started looking at this space and realized that our backyards are the third-largest crop by land area — it’s 10 times more land than all organic farms combined,” Lewis said. “If you have a passion around the environmental and human health implications of agriculture, this is a huge piece of it.”
In 2018, he teamed up with his brother Trent to launch Sunday, which has now collected millions of data points from satellite images, historical climate reports, property records and more to create the world’s largest — and first — residential soil data repository.
The startup’s machine learning system crunches this data to determine the individual needs of individual customers’ lawns. Its chief science officer — who holds a Ph.D. in turf grass, and is responsible for maintaining the green at Yankee Stadium — then mixes a custom formula for customers, relying on ingredients like seaweed, molasses and iron to help customers care for their lawn without impacting the quality of their drinking water. Sunday customers receive an average of three shipments annually, and the startup claims to deliver better results at a lower cost than the average lawn care service.
“What we’re offering isn’t a rebranded, more modern, cleaner version of something. It’s actually an end-to-end experience,” Lewis said. “That’s an entirely new offering in this space, and I think it resonates. I hope that’s why we’re seeing such growth.”
Most companies operating in the DIY lawn care arena are focused on connecting consumers with service professionals, Lewis said. Sunday, meanwhile, aims to empower individuals to care for their own lawns themselves — a proposition that resonates particularly strong with its Millennial customers, who “have more indoor plants than any other generation in history,” Lewis said. Revenue at the startup is up 8 percent year over year. He estimated the DIY lawn care market in the U.S. is worth $48 million.
“We are constantly inventing new approaches because, in this space, there’s never been an application technology,” Lewis said. “So there’s just so much low-hanging fruit, and so many ways we can use this data to better serve our customers.”
The 38-person company is currently hiring for about 10 roles, with open positions in front- and back-end engineering, UI/UX design, marketing and more.
The Series B round brings total investment in Sunday to $28 million. Sequoia Capital led the round, with participation from Tusk Ventures and Forerunner Ventures.
