June 2026 Amber Grant Awarded to FiXA

We’re excited to announce the June $10,000 Amber Grant recipient. Congratulations to Schola Eburuoh and Sophia Casino, founders of FiXA.

Recently, WomensNet Advisory Board member Marcia Layton Turner sat down with Schola for an exclusive interview. You can listen to their conversation and view the transcript below.

Video Transcript

Marcia: Welcome to a chat with our June 2026 Amber Grant winner. Today, I have the great pleasure of speaking with Schola Eburuoh of FiXA. The Amber Grant, our longest-running grant, is open to all women business owners in the U.S. and Canada.

I’m Marcia Layton Turner. I’m a member of the WomensNet Advisory Board, and usually every other month-ish, I get the opportunity to learn more from our fabulous winners.

So let’s start from the beginning, Schola. How about you tell everyone a little bit about your company, what you sell, where you got the idea, and how things are going.

Schola: Happy to. We like to call FiXA the handy person in your pocket that also helps you to become more handy yourself. You basically go onto heyfixa.com. You can snap a photo or describe an issue that you’re having in your home as a homeowner, and you get step-by-step guidance on how to fix that item or that thing or do that repair yourself for those easy fixes. And in Greater Philadelphia, we’ve launched our contractor network as well, which is mostly, if not all, women contractors and local family-owned contracting businesses that we’re scaling, and we vetted well, and we’d use them in our own homes. And it’s been such an amazing opportunity to build it.

It began in a funny way, in a class, actually, at MIT. My co-founder, Sophia, and I started it together, and we’ve been building it together. And before we met, she had a drain issue that she’d been dealing with for months. She had a contractor come through. He said, “Oh, it’s easy. Just use a drain snake. You’ll be fine.” She bought a drain snake, but it didn’t work, and she was showering in the gym for months. We met in this class, and in the class, you’re supposed to build a business based on a problem you’re having every day, and this is the problem. Starting showering in the gym was all we talked about. Then my refrigerator also broke down. So we just both had these issues in our homes that were kind of just adding to the stress that we didn’t really need, obviously, in our lives.

So we had the idea of, what if we could help other people, especially women, just understand what’s going on in their home and get some guidance, even if it’s just that first step, instead of the anxiety of, “Okay, do I call another person? Is that person going to also try to rip me off?” Or, “What should I do next? Is this even safe for me to try?” So that became FiXA. Again, you snap a photo, and you get that education right off the bat. And it was built as a part of this MIT class and scaled because we got to pitch it and heard so much great feedback from contractors who wanted to support when people couldn’t do it themselves, because there are things that we shouldn’t touch, as well as a lot of women homeowners, where 21% of single women are owning homes now in the U.S. So we’re really trying to support ourselves and each other in this journey towards homeownership.

My research and my work focused on affordable housing. I’ve worked with Habitat for Humanity, an amazing nonprofit, for over 10 years, really trying to solve the issue of once you’re in the home, it’s a celebration. It’s amazing to own your home and have a place that you can call home for your family as well. But then when something goes wrong, it’s always that gut-wrenching feeling of, “Okay, is this going to be it?” Like, it becomes so expensive. So that’s what FiXA is meant to solve: no more contractor anxiety or anxiety about home repair issues. It really is confidence starting at home.

Marcia: Love it. I’d love to talk now about the resources that you found especially helpful as you were building your company. What’s one resource that you might suggest to women in your shoes a few years ago?

Schola: I feel like surrounding yourself with other founders is super helpful. And even if you don’t physically have other founders, we thankfully, being in the Harvard/MIT space, were really part of the Harvard Innovation Lab and have a really great mentor, Tom, going to shout him out, who just encouraged us to continue to push on this idea to kind of find the nitty-gritty things that interest us about it. Sophia and I, my co-founder, are both trained architects too, so thinking about why we’re so interested in things breaking down and putting them back together, well, it kind of made sense naturally. And people who will encourage you in that mission that you’re building, because it can become really lonely, and having to be your own CEO can be really difficult at times.

So, yeah, surrounding yourself with those people for support and then also just validating your idea through talking to people as well. A big piece of what we were building was… We saw it ourselves, of course, with Sophia’s drain, but we talked to over 100 homeowners and just asked them about the problem. I would sit at coffee shops, and if someone new sat next to me, I’d just ask them, “So what’s the most annoying thing that’s happening in your home?” And some people were really happy to answer that question. I had the longest conversations with strangers, and it just humanizes what you’re working on, you know? It’s not just you. You’re actually solving someone’s problem. You’re solving a pain point. And actually, I made some good friends through that. So I would say just surround yourself with good people and understand that your problem is worth solving.

Marcia: Excellent. Now let’s talk a little bit about marketing. What’s the best marketing strategy you’ve discovered so far? If you were going to recommend to a woman entrepreneur that you need to try this, what would that one thing be?

Schola: Oh, that’s a good question. I’d say the number one marketing strategy for us has been relationship-driven. Again, harping on my background with Habitat for Humanity, they were one of our first partners, and they’re utilizing FiXA for their workshops, their home repair workshops. And from there, connecting with them, they have other organizations that they work with doing similar projects, and that’s across multiple counties in Pennsylvania. So, beginning that very local relationship, connecting with organizations, especially if you’re… We’re a consumer product, but there are businesses, nonprofits, or other organizations and institutions that are connected to those homeowners. So, when I’m not around, going to coffee shops and talking to people directly, I’m sending a great email or hopefully getting a coffee chat with a mentor in those spaces in housing that connect to homeowners directly.

Marcia: And finally, what’s one thing that our community, which is tens of thousands of women business owners, what’s one thing we can do to support you?

Schola: I would love for everyone to take a look at heyfixa.com and share the site with a woman you know who owns a home. As simple as that. It’s a completely free site to use as a DIY guide. We want to keep it open source and education-based, especially if you’re anywhere. But that woman who just messaged in your group chat that she has a leaky faucet, or wants to completely remodel her home, or your sister who just bought her first home, that’s the moment that FiXA was built for, and we’d love to support you and the friends and those around you.

Marcia: Excellent. Well, thank you so much for sharing your story with us, and congratulations again on being our June Amber Grant winner.