The orders were silly. Somebody in Sydney wanted fried chicken at 2am, and the people who drove it across town were not couriers but the founders of a start-up, doing the job themselves because no one else was yet on the platform.
Tim Fung grew up in St Ives Chase, a quiet northern Sydney suburb. He went to university in the city and then into Macquarie Bank, arriving in the years he later described as an insane run of success, roughly 2004 to 2008. For a young graduate it looked like a staircase going only up.
What almost nobody connects to the Airtasker story is where he landed.
Then, in 2009, the staircase ended. Fung was made redundant.
What almost nobody connects to the Airtasker story is where he landed. He took a job at a modelling agency, Chic Management, and from the back of that office he helped launch a mobile phone company called amaysim. The banker who lost his seat ended up building a telco out of a modelling business. It was there that he met Jonathan Lui, and it was there that he met the investors who would later write the first cheques for Airtasker.
The idea arrived in 2011, as the two moved apartments. Half of the misery of a move was small jobs somebody else could do. Fung has said he knew it was a winner when he pitched it to a housemate who disagreed with him about most things. The company launched in 2012 with A$1.5 million. A second raise of A$2M in 2013 valued it at A$10M.
It was not smooth. Fung has said they tried a lot of things and failed at a lot of them, and that it took years to get going. The founders ran errands themselves. At one point pamphlets they had been paid to distribute were reportedly thrown away, leaving them to face unhappy customers. Rivals TaskBox and Occasional Butler were bought rather than beaten.
Money came, and went faster. A$6.5M in 2015, A$22M from Seven West Media in 2016, A$33M in 2017 to try the United Kingdom. Fung has recalled a stretch when the company burned about A$2 million a month. In 2017 Freelancer accused it over an ad campaign, in 2018 came a data breach, and by December the tax office was auditing its R&D claims.
The company listed on the ASX under the code ART. In its 2026 financial year, group gross marketplace value reached a record of about A$240 million, revenue was about A$57.8 million, and the loss at the operating line had narrowed to about A$21 million. Management is now aiming for positive free cash flow in the 2027 year.
The redundancy that looked like an ending is the quiet hinge of the whole story. A man pushed out of a bank's boom had nothing to defend, took a job nobody would have predicted, and sat close enough to the right people when an idea walked in. First-time founders often wait for a perfect launch. Fung's version is less tidy: lose the plan, stay near good people, and be willing to deliver the chicken yourself.