Apurva Shrivastava

The Dispatch

A ringing phone, and the money nobody was catching

When a Dallas heating-and-air company misses a call, it is not missing a $14 lunch order. It is missing a $40,000 furnace install. Apurva Shrivastava heard that number at a Texas conference in 2023 and rebuilt his entire company around it.

Today he is co-founder and Co-CEO of Avoca, a New York company that builds AI agents for the unglamorous, enormous world of home services: HVAC, plumbing, roofing, electrical. The agents answer calls, book jobs, chase follow-ups, and run marketing while the humans are up on a roof or under a sink. The pitch is almost rude in its simplicity. Every good contractor already knows the playbook. Answer every call. Follow up relentlessly. Avoca just refuses to sleep.

In April 2026 the company announced it had raised more than $125 million across Seed, Series A, and Series B, at a valuation of $1 billion. Kleiner Perkins led the Series A. Meritech and General Catalyst led the B. For a startup that began by pointing at restaurants, it is a strange and specific place to land a unicorn: somewhere between a dispatch board and a dial tone.

Our AI is always on. It can answer a call and book a job directly at 3 a.m. — Apurva Shrivastava

The number that reframed his career was not a market-size slide. It was the gap between a missed lunch order and a missed furnace install, the difference between pocket change and a mortgage payment. Once you see that gap, the whole business looks obvious. The trick was being in the room when someone said it out loud.

Origin Story

01 / THE POKER NIGHT

Two engineers, one bad idea, one great pivot

Shrivastava met his co-founder Tyson Chen at an MIT poker night. Both were computer-science people who liked building things that talked back. The thing they built was an AI system to handle missed calls. The market they first aimed it at was restaurants.

That part did not work. The restaurant on the other end of a missed call loses pocket change. The whole model only clicked when someone with much more on the line walked over and tapped them on the shoulder.

The detail that changed everything

The shoulder-tap came from Rescue Air, a Dallas HVAC company, at a restaurant-industry conference in Texas. Wrong room, right people. The contractors explained the math that restaurants could never offer: one ignored ring could be tens of thousands of dollars walking to a competitor.

Shrivastava and Chen spent the next three months building a product for exactly one customer, Rescue Air, who in turn handed them their first several customers. It is a founder cliche to say you should build for one user before you build for a thousand. Avoca did it literally, in someone else's industry, after wandering into the wrong conference.

Both founders came at the problem with the same private memory. Shrivastava grew up in Michigan helping his parents run a small business, fielding the tiresome calls and messages that come with it. Chen's mother ran an acupuncture practice in Pennsylvania. They had both been the kid answering the phone.

This is a huge growth moment in the home services economy. What Avoca has realized is these people are the main characters. — Apurva Shrivastava, on the technicians AI is meant to arm, not replace

The Resume Before The Resume

Before the phone, the products

Avoca is not a first attempt. Shrivastava is a second-time founder who studied computer science at MIT, then built AI products at Apple and at Sunshine, and most recently engineered at Retool, the company that lets teams assemble internal tools out of building blocks.

It is a tidy through-line. Apple taught him polish. Retool taught him that the best software disappears into the workflow of people who are not engineers. Avoca is that lesson aimed at a plumber's front desk: software that gets out of the way and just picks up.

2020-2022

Software engineer at Retool, building the connective tissue of internal tools.

Earlier

Worked on AI products at Apple and at Sunshine.

2022

Co-founds Avoca with Tyson Chen.

2023

Y Combinator, Winter 2023 batch. Pivots from restaurants to home services after meeting Rescue Air in Texas.

2024

Seed closes; Series A led by Kleiner Perkins.

2026

$125M+ raised at a $1B valuation; Series B led by Meritech and General Catalyst.

CAPITAL RAISED, BY ROUND (cumulative, $M)

Seed (YC)

~$5M

Series A

Kleiner-led

Series B

$125M+ total

Bars show relative cumulative scale across rounds. Public figures: $125M+ raised in total at a $1B valuation. Round-by-round splits not all disclosed.

BY THE NUMBERS

The shape of a $1B bet

80+ people at Avoca, headquartered in New York.

Eight figures of annual recurring revenue reported for 2025.

~$1B in jobs the AI is on track to book in 2026.

The Playbook

What the agent actually does

INBOUND

Picks up, every time

24/7 phone answering plus personalized text and email. No hold music, no missed lead, no voicemail purgatory.

BOOKING

Books the job on the spot

The agent schedules and confirms appointments directly, turning a 3 a.m. call into a slot on tomorrow's board.

OUTBOUND

Follows up relentlessly

Estimate follow-ups, review collection, loyalty and re-engagement campaigns. The boring work that wins contractors.

Every successful contractor already has a winning playbook. Answer every call. Follow up relentlessly. — Apurva Shrivastava

Quirks & Footnotes

Things that amuse, things that explain

The co-founder he built a unicorn with? Met him at an MIT poker night. The house, it turns out, does not always win.
Both founders were radicalized by family small businesses: his parents' shop in Michigan, Chen's mother's acupuncture practice in Pennsylvania.
Avoca was aimed at restaurants first. The pivot to HVAC was an accident at the wrong conference, and it was worth roughly a billion dollars.
His resume reads Apple, Sunshine, Retool, then a plumber's front desk. The least glamorous job is the biggest one.

THE THESIS, IN ONE LINE

Arm the tradespeople. Don't replace them.

Most AI stories are about subtraction: fewer people, fewer jobs. Shrivastava tells an addition story. The technician keeps the wrench. The AI keeps the phone. The home services economy, he argues, is growing, and the people doing the physical work are the main characters of it.

It is a contrarian thing to build in a world racing to automate humans out of the frame. He built the tool that hands them a megaphone instead.

Tyson Chen, co-founder Kleiner Perkins Meritech General Catalyst Amplify Partners Y Combinator Rescue Air

The Long Game

Why a New York engineer fell for the trades

There is a reflex in technology to build for the people who look like the builders. More developer tools. More software for software companies. Shrivastava had every credential to do exactly that, and a stint at Retool that would have made it easy. Instead Avoca planted itself in New York and pointed its talent at an industry that rarely gets a second glance from venture capital.

The logic holds up under pressure. Home services is, as Chen has put it, one of the last great underdigitized markets. The phones still ring. The schedules still live in someone's head or on a whiteboard. The work cannot be offshored or downloaded, because the furnace is in your basement and the leak is in your wall. That stubborn physicality is the moat. You cannot automate the plumber, so the only thing left to automate is everything around the plumber.

That framing also answers the question every AI founder eventually faces: are you building a feature or a company? Avoca's wager is that the answer is a company, because the same agent that answers a call can book the job, confirm the appointment, chase the estimate, gather the review, and re-engage the customer a year later. It is not a smarter voicemail. It is the front desk, the dispatcher, and the marketing department, awake at hours no human reasonably works.

Selling where the customers actually are

Most software companies grow online, through search ads and content and the slow drip of inbound demos. Avoca grew at trade shows. It grew in conference hallways and through contractors recommending it to other contractors who would never describe themselves as early adopters. The same network effects that almost missed them in that Texas restaurant conference became the engine once they were pointed at the right room.

It is a quietly radical go-to-market for a company stuffed with MIT engineering pedigree. The product is sophisticated; the distribution is a handshake. By 2026 that handshake had compounded into 800-plus customers and eight figures of recurring revenue, with an AI on track to book something close to a billion dollars in jobs across the year.

The names on the customer list make the bet legible. Turnpoint. Goettl. Sila Services. 1-800-GOT-JUNK?. These are not pilot programs run by curious CTOs. They are operators who measure software by a single brutal metric: did it answer the call, and did the call become money. Avoca's entire existence is staked on that one yes.

Who's Calling

The names on the other end of the line

Avoca grew the old-fashioned way for an AI company: trade shows, conferences, and word of mouth between contractors who do not spend their evenings on tech Twitter. The customer roster reads like the backbone of physical America.

Turnpoint 1-800-GOT-JUNK? Goettl H.L. Bowman Sila Services HVAC · Plumbing · Roofing · Electrical