The Dallas marketplace turning America's most stubborn chore - fixing the house - into something you can schedule, track and trust.
Every real-estate startup wants to reinvent the glamorous parts of property - the listing, the mortgage, the smart lock. Stellar picked the part nobody wanted: the 9 p.m. call about a leaking pipe, the no-show contractor, the resident who has now waited four days for a working air conditioner in a Texas summer. That is the problem Stellar was built to solve, and it is a big one. Roughly 110 million Americans rent, and the maintenance that keeps their homes livable runs on phone tag, spreadsheets and guesswork.
Stellar is a technology-driven, managed marketplace. On one side sit property managers and, increasingly, homeowners who need something fixed. On the other sits a network of more than 8,000 independent tradespeople - plumbers, HVAC techs, electricians, roofers. Stellar's software sits in the middle, matching the right contractor to each job and using artificial intelligence and machine learning to make the process faster and more predictable.
The company was founded in Dallas in 2016 as IFM Restoration - short for Integrity First Maintenance - by Dustin Marx, who had felt the maintenance headache from every angle: as a resident, a property manager and a contractor. In September 2022 the company rebranded to Stellar, a name meant to signal national ambition. Three months later it raised a $20 million Series B.
What began as an idea to help good contractors find steady work grew into something with real scale. By the time of the rebrand, Stellar served 10 of the 11 largest single-family rental operators in the country, covered more than 150,000 properties, and had resolved over 200,000 maintenance issues.
The work is unglamorous by design. It is also enormous - and, until recently, almost entirely un-digitized.
The genius - and the difficulty - of home maintenance is that it involves three groups with different incentives. Stellar's platform is designed to align them.
Single-family rental operators managing thousands of homes get one dashboard to dispatch, track and report on every repair - instead of a phone tree.
Renters get faster fixes and status updates by text, replacing the black-box wait that sours a tenancy.
8,000+ tradespeople get a steady stream of vetted work routed to them, with less time spent chasing jobs and invoices.
A direct-to-consumer service now books repairs - plumbing to roofing - in under a minute across 30+ markets.
Stellar's earliest and largest customers are the institutional operators who own and manage single-family rental homes at scale. Winning 10 of the 11 biggest of them is not the kind of thing you do with a slick sales deck - you do it by fixing one leaky pipe, then two hundred thousand more, and proving the platform holds up.
Home maintenance fails at the seams between people. A resident reports an issue. A property manager has to find, vet and dispatch a contractor. The contractor may or may not get the message, may or may not show up, may or may not fix it on the first visit. Every handoff is a chance for the chain to break - and it breaks constantly.
Stellar's answer is to own the coordination layer. Instead of leaving matching to whoever answers the phone, it uses data on job type, location and contractor performance to route work predictably. The metric that matters most in home services is the first-visit fix rate - getting it right the first time - and that is precisely what a smarter matching engine is built to improve.
Managed, not just listed. Unlike a directory that hands you a list of names, Stellar manages the job end to end - dispatch, tracking, reporting.
Six years as IFM Restoration gave Stellar hard-won operating knowledge of a messy, offline industry before it ever leaned on the "tech" label.
Competition comes from other proptech maintenance platforms - Lessen, Lula, Latchel, Property Meld - as well as broad consumer marketplaces like Angi and the in-house maintenance teams that operators have long run themselves. Stellar's wager is that a marketplace purpose-built for single-family rental, then extended to homeowners, beats both the generalists and the do-it-yourself teams on speed, transparency and cost.
The core platform connecting property managers and residents to vetted contractors, with AI-assisted matching for each maintenance issue.
Tools to coordinate, track and complete repair projects with transparency and reporting for both managers and tradespeople.
Direct-to-homeowner repairs: plumbing, HVAC, electrical, roofing, garage doors, fencing, landscaping and general upkeep - with free onsite estimates.
Scheduling, status updates and job coordination for residents, homeowners and contractors on the go.
For a property manager, Stellar replaces a wall of sticky notes with a system of record. For a homeowner, it is the difference between three unanswered calls and an appointment booked in under a minute. For a contractor, it is a fuller calendar with less admin.
Stellar makes money by sitting between demand and supply and taking a role in the jobs that flow through its platform.
On the enterprise side, it holds contracts with large single-family rental operators who route their maintenance through the platform - a recurring, high-volume relationship. On the consumer side, its Stellar Home Maintenance service books individual homeowner repairs directly, expanding the top of the funnel and the addressable market.
Both sides feed the same flywheel: more jobs attract more contractors, and a deeper contractor network makes the platform more useful to the next property manager or homeowner. Third-party estimates put annual revenue around $10 million, with a team of roughly 79 that the company set out to nearly double through 2023 across operations, sales, marketing and technology.
Stellar's December 2022 Series B was led by Weatherford Capital, with existing investors returning. It brought total venture funding to roughly $35 million.
Led the $20M Series B; principal David Seider joined the board of directors.
Returning investor focused on the built world and construction tech.
Texas-based venture firm and long-time backer of the company.
Alerion Ventures and Navigate Ventures rounded out the syndicate.
Dustin Marx launches Integrity First Maintenance in Dallas to help quality contractors find steady work.
IFM becomes Stellar and names former Facebook executive Renaud Casanova as CTO for its next phase of growth.
Weatherford Capital leads the round; total funding reaches roughly $35 million.
Matt Wetrich - who scaled delivery startup Veho from 3 markets to 32 - joins as VP of Operations and later becomes CEO.
Stellar scales its consumer home-maintenance service to 30+ markets across roughly a dozen states.
Stellar has stacked its leadership with people who have scaled hard, physical, logistics-heavy businesses - not just software.
Former Veho and Uber leader who helped grow Veho from 3 markets to 32 and revenue more than 15x. Joined Stellar as VP of Operations before stepping into the CEO role.
Former Facebook executive appointed CTO in 2022 to lead the technology and product platform through the rebrand and beyond.
The through-line is logistics. Dispatching a plumber to the right home at the right time, and making sure the job is done on the first visit, has more in common with routing delivery drivers than with shipping a web app - and Stellar has hired accordingly.
Home services and maintenance is one of the largest, most fragmented and least digitized markets in the country. Stellar's wedge is single-family rental - a sector that institutional investors have poured into over the past decade, creating operators who manage tens of thousands of homes and desperately need maintenance to run like a system rather than a scramble.
By winning the biggest of those operators first, Stellar built density: many homes, many jobs, many contractors, concentrated in specific markets. That density is what now lets it extend the same network to individual homeowners. It is a classic marketplace move - anchor with the enterprise customer who guarantees volume, then open the doors to consumers who benefit from the supply you have already assembled.
It runs a technology-driven marketplace that connects property managers and homeowners with vetted local tradespeople to complete home maintenance and repairs, using software and AI to coordinate the work.
Yes. It was founded in 2016 as IFM Restoration (Integrity First Maintenance) and rebranded to Stellar in September 2022.
Large single-family rental operators and property managers - it serves 10 of the 11 biggest - plus a growing base of homeowners across 30+ markets.
A $20M Series B in December 2022 led by Weatherford Capital, bringing total venture funding to roughly $35 million.
Dallas, Texas - at 14901 Quorum Drive - operating across markets in the U.S. Sun Belt.
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Founded 2016 · Dallas, Texas · Formerly IFM Restoration · Sources: company site, Business Wire, Dallas Innovates, S3 Ventures, Crunchbase.