Stella Wu

Start with the spreadsheet that never balanced. In 2017 Wu bought a house and decided to add an accessory dwelling unit. What followed reads less like a home-improvement story and more like a case study in market failure: 150-plus emails to contractors that mostly went into the void, bids that swung from $40,000 to $100,000 for the same scope, a permit that took 350 days, and more than $1,000 spent on the wrong materials because nobody told her otherwise.

Most people would have framed the finished room and moved on. Wu, who had just spent four years at Wish learning how to move millions of dollars through paid-acquisition funnels, looked at the mess and saw a structure underneath it. The contractors were not the villains. They were affordable, skilled, and almost completely cut off from the homeowners who needed them - no marketing, no admin, no software, no leverage. The market was not broken because the people were bad. It was broken because the rails did not exist.

She started laying them herself. First informally - helping friends manage their bathroom and ADU projects, acting as the translation layer between a homeowner's anxiety and a crew's calendar. By 2019 the side-favor had a name: Eano, short for Easy Affordable Renovation. The early product walked homeowners through a renovation and connected them to vetted, licensed, insured contractors. The later product turned around to face the contractors directly, handing them the sales, scheduling, and payment tools that every other industry had taken for granted for a decade.

That pivot - from a consumer renovation service to the operating system for the trades - is the throughline of Wu's work. She is not trying to make renovation cute. She is trying to give a 150-year-old industry the same software dignity that her old employer gave to discount shopping.

The early Eano focused on the homeowner: pair them with vetted, fully licensed and insured professionals, keep every conversation and milestone in one place, and offer pricing transparent enough that the project would not surprise anyone halfway through. During the pandemic, when everyone was suddenly staring at the walls they wanted to change, the model caught fire - contract revenue grew roughly fivefold, and the business was up about 70% year over year in the first quarter of 2021. It was enough to convince Builders VC to lead a $6 million Series A, joined by Newfund, Celtic House, and - tellingly - Wish co-founder Danny Zhang, who had watched Wu work up close.

But the more interesting move came later, when Eano turned to face the other side of the market. The contractors Wu had once chased for quotes became the customers. Eano Pro positions itself as a single system where an independent builder can run marketing, sales and estimates, project management, daily logs, and financial reporting - with AI doing the grunt work of generating estimates and surfacing what needs attention. It is, in effect, the back office that the one-truck contractor never had time or money to assemble.