Why We Are Building
Backed by Meritech, General Catalyst, Kleiner Perkins, Amplify Partners, Nexus Venture Partners, and Y Combinator, Avoca is on track to book $1B in jobs this...
Today, we announced our Series B at a $1 billion valuation, bringing our total raise to more than $125 million across Seed, Series A, and Series B. The news was first reported by Allie Garfinkle for Fortune.
A note from our founders, Tyson Chen and Apurva Shrivastava on what we are building and why:
The services economy is getting its software moment
Picture the front office of a 30 person HVAC company on a Saturday in July. Three CSRs working the phones. A manager trying to keep up with a board full of unconfirmed jobs. Calls rolling to voicemail by mid morning. Somewhere on a Google Local Services dashboard, hundreds of dollars in ad spend has burned through driving leads that nobody had the bandwidth to answer. The owner is in the field, because the third tech called out and there is a no heat call across town that cannot wait. By the end of the day the team will have done excellent work for the customers they reached. The ones they missed will be a competitor's customers tomorrow.
This is the services economy in America. For decades it has run on heroics, spreadsheets, and a stack of vendors taped together. A marketing agency, a call center, a CRM, a dispatch tool, a review platform, a payment processor, and at least one person whose actual job is to make all of those things talk to each other. It is the largest, most labor intensive, most cash generating part of our economy. And it is the one nobody has built durable software for.
That is not an accident. It is structural.
What is actually different now
For the first time, every contractor in America can run a concierge grade revenue operation. Not the kind a national franchise can afford with a 20 person inside sales team. The kind any operator can run, at any size.
Every call answered, including the ones that come in at 9 PM on a Sunday. Every web lead followed up within seconds. Every customer reached out to at the right moment in their lifecycle. Every marketing dollar tracked from the ad click to the dispatched job to the final invoice. None of it requires hiring a single new person. The work that used to require four vendors and a marketing coordinator now runs on one platform, and the platform gets smarter every day it is used.
This is what we have been building at Avoca.
Today we're announcing what we've been building
For the first time, we are sharing publicly that Avoca has raised over $125M across Seed to Series B, backed by Kleiner Perkins, Meritech, General Catalyst, Amplify Partners, Nexus Venture Partners, and Y Combinator and many of the best investors in Silicon Valley. We are deploying that capital to build AI agents for the services economy, starting in home services and extending into roofing, restoration, auto, and the other large industries where the same operating dynamics apply.
Where AI value actually accrues
There is a thesis behind this raise that is worth saying out loud.
In AI, the most durable value will accrue at the application layer. That is where the real work happens. The frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic have already cracked the app layer for certain data heavy use cases like coding, where training data is plentiful and the workflows are largely captured in open source repositories. But the more difficult, more data absent workflow applications, the ones built on tribal knowledge and operator instinct rather than terabytes of available training data, are still up for grabs.
These are the exact trenches where Avoca operates.
When we sit at the center of a contractor's workflow, our customers do more than automate tasks. They start to learn what actually drives outcomes. Which leads convert to booked jobs and why. Which follow ups matter and which ones are noise. Which playbooks work for their market and which look good in theory but fall apart in the field. As our product sharpens, they build a system level understanding of what works across their own customer base, something they could not build before because the data was scattered across half a dozen vendors, a stack of spreadsheets, and the heads of their three best CSRs.
That is the kind of advantage that compounds.
The early signs
We are still in the first phase of this, and the proof is in what our customers can do that they could not do twelve months ago. Operators we work with are capturing leads at hours of the day they previously could not. They are converting more web visitors into booked jobs through scheduling tools that actually understand their business. Their call center managers are coaching off the full set of calls instead of a sample of fifteen. Their owners are seeing where every marketing dollar lands, all the way to the job.
The pattern is consistent. Operators who adopt AI early in their workflow are pulling away from the ones who do not. The gap is widening, and we expect it to keep widening for a long time.
Beyond home services
The same operating dynamics, fragmented vendor stacks, labor as the binding constraint, customer experience as a competitive moat, show up across roofing, restoration, auto, and many of the other massive verticals that make up the services economy. Each of these is a multi billion dollar market in its own right. Each of them is going to need an AI native platform that actually understands the work, not a horizontal tool retrofitted to fit. We are building toward that future, one vertical at a time.
Just getting started
We are in the first phase of building a generational company. The services economy has waited a long time for its software moment, and we are determined to be the company that delivers it.
To our customers, investors, and partners who have been part of this journey with us, thank you. We are not done. Not even close.
—Apurva and Tyson
