Yelp just spent $80M on a site for car repair estimates

Yelp, which made a name for itself giving restaurant recs, just bought an auto services website.

In the company’s earnings report on Thursday, Yelp revealed that it agreed to buy RepairPal, a site for car repair estimates, for $80 million in cash.

The acquisition is expected to close by the end of the year, subject to customary closing conditions.

“We believe RepairPal will accelerate our broader services efforts by expanding our offerings in the multi-billion dollar U.S. auto services advertising vertical,” Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp’s co-founder and CEO, said in a statement.

While it might not seem like an obvious marriage, RepairPal fits into Yelp’s ambition to become a major home services funnel.

In recent years, Yelp has added functionality beyond restaurant and business search tools, like an AI-powered feature that suggests plumbers, repairmen, and other home service providers to users potentially in need of them. Yelp also introduced a program, Yelp Guaranteed, that offers up to $2,500 of coverage for qualifying projects in case of problems.

Yelp makes money through fees it receives from service providers for certain leads — and through ads. In the company’s most recent fiscal quarter, advertising revenue from services businesses increased 11% year-over-year to a record $228 million, with revenue growth of around 15% n the home services category alone.

The acquisition is a nice exit for San Francisco-based RepairPal, which managed to raise $21.3 million in funding from Cars.com, Tugboat Ventures, and others in the 17 years since the company’s founding. In its press release, Yelp didn’t say whether founders Aaron Tavistock, David Esser, and David Sturtz will be joining Yelp corporate.

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