Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

Digging into trademarks, incorporations and S-1's is a weird little obsession of mine..

That said, my initial findings are that Flymaids is directly related to Homejoy. Under Privacy link of Flymaids it states "In the European Union, we are Fly Maids Europe Limited, a company incorporated in England and Wales (registration number 8883585) with its registered office address at 14 Whittonditch Road, Ramsbury, Marlborough, Wiltshire, United Kingdom, SN8 2PY."

If you lookup the registration number at Wales Companies House, it shows owner as "HOMEJOY EUROPE LIMITED"

https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/08883585

FWIW, they changed their registered address on 8/7/15, ten days short of their announcing to cease operations: http://bit.ly/1kbHtyJ

As I mentioned in another post, they don't seem to be actually registered in Deleware and there are typos related to find/replace (support@flymaids.com.com) so I'm not sure we can discount the chance someone just cut/pasted that from the original Homejoy privacy page. Homejoy's privacy page doesn't load and the wayback machine was blocked via robots.txt so we have no good way of checking that I can think of.

Also, nice to meet someone else obsessed with investigating incorporation documents. :)

That's a residential address, but seems to be being used as a registered office for the UK branches of a few US tech companies. e.g. Hired.com, Canvas.

This may be known already, but HOMEJOY, INC. is a Delaware corporation with the filing number: 4815336

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As mentioned in Flymaids privacy policy, their "head office" in Delaware is actually offices to incorporate.com; a registered agent for out of state companies.

Also, a DBA search in Delaware returns nothing: http://www.courts.delaware.gov/tradenames/JICKioskSearch.asp...

That's the head office of Nortons accountants, who I'd imagine are handling the liquidation. Changing the registered address is normal. http://www.nortonsgroup.com/uk/global-offices

The liquidators have the power to dispose of the assets as they wish, in an attempt to return as much money to creditors (and the taxman) as possible. It's entirely possible that they've decided to try and keep some parts of the company active and have outsourced the dev work to a shady 3rd party. Alternatively they might be moving the sellable assets into a separate company which can itself be sold soon/later. Odds are that the founders weren't behind this move.

> Odds are that the founders weren't behind this move.

Are you insinuating that someone other than Aaron Cheung sent the email from the top of the post? That seems... strange.

Well the issue appears to be settled it was Aaron Cheung:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10467925

Is there any way if getting the company status without having yo pay $10? Seems bizarre you have to pay to see if the company is still in business or not!

In case anyone really wants to go digging, homejoy was archived and the WARCs are available in these collections (ctrl-f homejoy):

https://archive.org/download/archiveteam_archivebot_go_20150...

https://archive.org/download/archiveteam_archivebot_go_20150...

https://archive.org/download/archiveteam_archivebot_go_20150...

In the UK the liquidators hold the assets in a kind of trust. It is their responsibility to try and liquidate the assets to return money to the creditors.

In my case one of our founders purchased the domain name and the "good will of the company", and continued to run the company under that name as a "trading name". The actual company entity going forward was completely different.