Who will you call when your Internet connection is restricted by the fifth scaling meeting held at the same time three times this week, and your child has a project that needs to be completed at the last minute?
Yohana is a company that positions itself as a family concierge service, which helps families solve various problems and tasks in daily life. Yohana wants to be the spokesperson for the company. The Palo Alto, Calif. – based company conducted an initial pilot in Seattle last year and is now taking Los Angeles as its second core market, officially launching in the city on Tuesday.
Yohana launched a membership model of $249 a month, promising to help customers find plumbers, plan birthday parties, buy baby food and so on. The company cooperates with local piano teachers, artisans, flower shops and other service providers to provide such tasks. It also arranges a guide and researcher for each family subscribing to its platform to help manage short-term tasks (such as house maintenance) and long-term goals (such as travel routes).
Yohana is the creativity of founder and CEO Yoky Matsuoka, who was an executive of Google and apple and served as the chief technology officer of Google nest smart home department from 2017 to 2019. After leaving Google, Matsuoka founded yohana in 2020 with the goal of creating home centered technology. She chose to avoid the traditional venture capital supported entrepreneurial model in Silicon Valley and instead cooperated with an old-fashioned technology company: Panasonic, a Japanese consumer electronics group, which supported yohana to become an independent subsidiary with sufficient funds.
Matsuoka once worked in Nestle before Google spent $3.2 billion to acquire nestle in 2014. She said: “it feels that no matter how fast we go, it is very linear. This is a start-up company with an unknown brand, and it will take a long time to establish.”. She told dot to work with Panasonic. La: “I have the ability to work with a larger company and use their brand springboard faster.”
According to the company, in 2021, yohana launched a pilot project in Seattle for the first time, involving more than 1000 families. By using this service, these families can save about 8 to 10 hours of housework time per week. Matsuoka said that through the pilot, the company can further improve its products before entering new markets such as Los Angeles. For example, it builds new security and encryption applications to help families manage credit cards and other sensitive files.
“Before the founding of Seattle, we thought that people would not give us real personal tasks, such as passport renewal,” Matsuoka said. “It turns out that people feel the need to pass a lot of personal data on to us so that we can do more.”
Matsuoka said that in the future, the company will be able to use its massive data through the powerful functions of artificial intelligence and machine learning to make the lives of customers and suppliers easier – for example, if multiple families require the same service or experience, yohana’s technology can help simplify planning.
According to pitchbook, yohana’s technical support platform, together with more mature venture capital companies such as taskrabbit and instacart, is located in the so-called home technology field, which is an emerging sub industry. It has received a total of $1.4 billion in venture capital funds in 2021.