Housekeep Founder and CEO, Avin Rabheru has been recognised in the Queen’s New Year Honours list for 2022, receiving a MBE for services to entrepreneurship and digital innovation.
The award acknowledges Avin’s achievements as the Founder and CEO of Housekeep, who have become the UK’s largest home cleaning service, after Avin recognised that technology could be used to transform the lives of cleaners and to fix the broken UK home cleaning market.
As well as making it easy for customers to book, manage and pay for cleans online, Housekeep’s platform and apps create radically better conditions for cleaners. Housekeep’s technology pairs cleaners with local customers, which reduces the time they spend travelling and increases their utilisation. The technology increases cleaner earnings by up to 50%, and has saved over £6m in travel costs to date. The technology has also saved over 2,600 tonnes of CO2 - the equivalent of planting 42,000 trees.
Housekeep started in London in 2014 and has gone on to deliver millions of weekly and fortnightly cleans to homes across the capital. Housekeep is now expanding across the UK and has become one of Europe’s fastest growing companies. For the last 3 years Housekeep has featured in the Financial Times ‘FT1000’ list of the fastest growing companies in Europe, reaching a high of 6th place in 2019.
During this time Housekeep has also won ‘Tech Company of the Year’ at the UK Business Tech Awards, ‘Scale-Up Business of the Year’ at the Amazon Scale-Up Awards, ‘Consumer Business of the Year’ at the Growing Business Awards, while Avin was named ‘National Scale-Up Entrepreneur of the Year’ at the Great British Entrepreneur Awards.
With the backing of some of the best investors in the UK, Housekeep’s technology platform is now being expanded to fix the wider £40bn tradesperson market, creating a seamless booking experience for handypeople, plumbers, electricians, appliance engineers and gardeners.
On the announcement, Avin said:
“I'm delighted to be recognised in the Queen's Honours list. Credit must go to the terrific colleagues who have built Housekeep alongside me, as well to our cleaners and tradespeople, who are the lifeblood of our business.”