Start-up of the week: ‘Get your phone fixed in hours, not days’ with Repairly

Every week, we take to the streets to find a start-up business right here in Hackney. This week, we spoke with a pair of techies who have raised £265,000 to finance a business they say will let people get broken technology fixed within hours, rather than days.

Repairly, as it’s known, was founded by Hackney Downs lads Richard Edwards, 24, and Fraser Williams, 22.

The app promises to make it “ridiculously simple” to get your phone, tablet or laptop up and working again.

It offers on-demand repairs, with a collect, repair and return service in London – which they say takes on average two hours and six minutes – cutting out the need to travel to repair shops.

Rich, who dropped out of university in 2015 to focus on the start-up full time, said: “Over 32,000 phones get broken every day in the UK alone. We ensure busy people with broken technology are back up and running as soon as possible.”

Rich, also an early team member of the online cleaning marketplace hassle.com, added: “We saw how much technology had advanced but the support for that technology was lagging behind. People were waiting for up to two weeks without their phone – that seems crazy in today’s technology-reliant society.”

The start-up has attracted investors including Grabble chief exec Daniel Murray and former Google executive Richard Pleeth.