Before “gig economy” became a byword for something more complicated, Alex Depledge was building one of its defining companies and helping write the rulebook for the sector she was creating.
In 2012, Alex Depledge and her co-founders were trying to solve a much smaller problem than the one that would eventually put them at the centre of UK’s sharing economy.
The business that became Hassle.com started life as Teddle, a booking platform covering 27 categories of local service providers, from driving instructors to dog walkers, and by the end of that year, Depledge, Jules Coleman, and Tom Nimmo had narrowed the idea to one thing, which was domestic cleaning.
Coleman had later called it the best decision the team ever made, and we think that exact pivot is really interesting.
Why?
Because most founder stories skip past the version of the company that didn’t work, well, Hassle did, and the version that replaced it went on to define an entire category of British business.
Building the model
Hassle.com launched publicly in mid-2012, after the founders went through the TechStars London accelerator. The model was really distinctive for its time: cleaners set their own rates and bid for jobs, building a direct relationship with the customer rather than working through an agency - an early proof point for the on-demand marketplace model that would come to define the sector.
It was a structural choice that separated Hassle from US rival Handy, and it became one of the clearest early templates for what gig economy UK platforms would later build on.
By May 2014, Hassle had raised a $6 million Series A round from Accel Partners - the venture firm’s first major UK consumer marketplace bet and notable enough at the time that Accel’s earlier backing of Spotify was used to frame the deal in press coverage. Coleman described the growth that followed as dramatic: the company went from a couple of hundred hours of cleaning booked in a single month to tens of thousands, and from five employees to 30 within six weeks.
It’s actually this period, more than any other, that first earned Depledge the label of serial entrepreneur in the UK press, even though Hassle was, at the time, still her one and only company.
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This was also the period in which Depledge became one of the more visible public faces of what was then called a genuinely new term: the sharing economy. She chaired the Coalition for a Digital Economy (Coadec) from 2015, sat on the board of the government-backed trade body Sharing Economy UK, and was named Entrepreneur of the Year by TechCity Insider in 2014.
In 2016, she was awarded an MBE for services to the sharing economy - a citation that, unusually, names the category itself rather than the company. She remains one of relatively few female founder voices closely associated with that early sharing economy era.
“I’d say a strong indicator is once you started building a growing business that was bringing in revenues and creating jobs, people took us seriously.”— Jules Coleman, Hassle.com co-founder, The Irish Times
We think that’s a useful corrective to the version of this story that gets told only through Depledge. Hassle was a three-founder business, and Coleman’s account of the early fundraising climate for a female founder team - including, by her own description, raised eyebrows in investor meetings when two women turned up without a male co-founder in the room, is part of the same record.
The exit
Berlin-based Helpling acquired Hassle.com in July 2015 for a reported €32 million, in one of the UK's notable early sharing-economy exits. The exact figure is genuinely disputed in the record, with TechCrunch describing the price as unconfirmed at the time, putting it in a $25-40 million range, while later other retrospective coverages has cited figures as low as £27 million.
We’re using €32 million here because it’s the figure independently reported, on the day, by the largest number of separate outlets, but readers should treat any single precise conversion with some caution.
The deal was framed at the time as consolidation ahead of expected competition from the US, where Handy and Homejoy were themselves in merger talks. Depledge, in an interview given around the time of the sale, said she didn’t feel threatened by Rocket Internet’s entry into the market through Helpling, describing the two companies’ strategies as fundamentally different.
“These complementary strengths of Helpling and Hassle.com will allow the company to further expand its leadership position in Europe.”— Benedikt Franke, Helpling co-founder, statement on the acquisition
What the sharing economy years built
The version of Depledge who left Hassle in 2015 wasn’t finished with founding companies, if anything, this is where she properly became a serial entrepreneur rather than a one-time founder. In 2016, she and Coleman incorporated what would become Resi - initially as BuildPath - after their own frustrating experience with a home extension. Depledge served as CEO for close to a decade, during which Resi grew into one of the UK’s largest residential architectural practices.
She’s also been candid, in a way relatively few UK founders are on the record, about what building Hassle cost her personally. In a widely cited Sifted interview, she traced her first experience of burnout back to her pre-Hassle career at Accenture, describing physical symptoms severe enough that she once went to A&E believing she was having a stroke. In a later interview, she also pointed to something more specific than generic founder stress as the real pressure point which was running out of money, and realising she couldn’t afford childcare anymore.
“VCs sweat their assets and their assets are founders. So how can you go ‘I need to sweat this asset and at the same time take care of it’? It’s diametrically opposed.”— Alex Depledge, Sifted
That thread runs, in a sense, right up to the present.
So in December 2025, Depledge stepped back from the Resi CEO role to join its board, writing on LinkedIn that she was “excited about what’s ahead.” By then she was already six months into a role with a direct line back to the sharing economy story she helped write: in June 2025, the Chancellor appointed her as the UK Treasury’s first-ever Entrepreneurship Advisor, working two days a week to identify barriers facing high-growth businesses - a role that has made her one of the most closely watched serial entrepreneurs now shaping policy rather than just building companies. She also sits as a non-executive director of Persimmon Homes and, since December 2025, of Goodlord.
We’d argue that arc is the real shape of the Hassle story: not a single company and a single exit, but a founder whose early, contested category, the sharing economy, was the training ground for a career now advising the people who set gig economy UK and wider startup policy.
What we’d still like to ask
Several details in Hassle’s early history come only from Depledge’s own speaker bios rather than independent reporting - including the exact revenue and city-expansion figures from the company’s growth phase, and the claim that its Series A was the largest ever raised by a solely female founder-led business at the time. We’d welcome the chance to verify these directly.
We also couldn’t find any independently reported detail on how Hassle’s self-employed cleaner model was treated under UK employment law relative to other gig economy UK platforms like Uber and Deliveroo, if there’s a specific record here, we’d like to include it accurately.
Editorial note
This piece draws on public reporting and previously published interviews. EP+ has reached out to Alex Depledge directly and would welcome her input - to verify, correct, or add detail to anything above.
Sources: Startups.co.uk (2014); HuffPost UK, interview with Jules Coleman (2014); Tech.eu, tech.eu, EU-Startups, FinSMEs, VatorNews and TechCrunch (all July 2015); The Irish Times (2018); Sifted, “Resi CEO Alex Depledge: On burnout, startup anxiety & unstoppable crying”; Sifted, “Are Oura rings and executive coaches the answer to founder burnout?” (2023); BusinessCloud (December 2025); GOV.UK, Treasury Entrepreneurship Advisor announcement (June 2025); Goodlord company announcement (December 2025); Companies House.
