The outsider who taught the trades to run on software
Gabriel Pinchev runs FieldPulse, the Dallas company whose software now sits at the center of thousands of HVAC, plumbing, and electrical businesses. In August 2025 the company closed a $50 million Series C, bringing its total funding to roughly $79 million. His current focus is pushing that platform into artificial intelligence, so a contractor's phone gets answered and a job gets booked even when no human is free to pick up.
The newest piece of that is Field Intelligence, FieldPulse's first AI product line. Its Operator AI works as a round-the-clock dispatcher, answering calls and scheduling work in several languages, while Chat AI captures leads off a company's website and books them in. For a plumber with three trucks and no front-office staff, the pitch is simple: stop losing the customer who calls after hours. "We're focused on creating a better experience from start to finish," Pinchev has said, framing the software less as a tool and more as the operating layer of a small business.
FieldPulse describes itself as the digital hub for running an entire contracting business from a single app - scheduling, dispatching, invoicing, asset tracking, customer records, and reporting in one place. The market it plays in is large and, for a long time, was mostly ignored by software companies. Field service management is heading toward an estimated $11 billion, and a huge share of the businesses in it still run on paper, spreadsheets, and dry-erase boards. That gap is the whole reason FieldPulse exists.
Everything is fed by our customers. We get a ton of feedback from them.
The origin is unglamorous by design. Pinchev came to the trades as a complete outsider. He studied at Southern Methodist University's Cox School of Business, giving him a finance grounding rather than an engineering one, and he had no background swinging a wrench or dispatching a crew. What he had was a close-up view of a problem. Working with contractors, he kept watching them send out stacks of handwritten paperwork - invoices, estimates, work orders - and then not get paid for the work they had already done. FieldPulse started as a way to help those businesses keep track of what they were owed and collect it faster.
He is candid that the early going was rough. He has described launching FieldPulse as "a punch in the mouth": a new industry, his first startup, and no existing playbook for selling software to tradespeople who had run their businesses just fine without it. Convincing someone who has used a whiteboard for twenty years to move their schedule into an app is a trust problem before it is a technology problem. That reality shaped how the company was built - around customization and hand-holding rather than a rigid, one-size-fits-all product.
That philosophy runs through the product. FieldPulse's own framing is that no two service businesses operate exactly alike, so the platform leans on custom workflows, templates, and automations that bend to how a given company already works instead of forcing it to change. It is a deliberate contrast to software that assumes every contractor should be run the same way. For an owner who has spent years refining their own process, being asked to abandon it is often the reason software adoption fails.
“It was a punch in the mouth - new industry, first startup, and no playbook.”
“Everything is fed by our customers.”
“We're focused on creating a better experience from start to finish.”
Ten years, one market, and a decision to go slow
FieldPulse did not appear overnight, and Pinchev did not chase whatever was fashionable in a given year. The company was founded in 2015 and spent its early life proving that trade contractors would pay for good software. In March 2019 it raised $2.2 million led by Capri Ventures and Apple Core Holdings. A $21 million Series B followed in late 2023, led by Atlanta-based Fulcrum Equity Partners. Fulcrum liked what it saw enough to come back and lead the $50 million Series C in 2025, this time alongside new backer Catalyst Investors.
The number that stands out in that story is not the headline raise but the pace between rounds. FieldPulse grew roughly fourfold in the 21 months separating its Series B from its Series C. That kind of curve, in a market often written off as boring, is what makes investors willing to write eight-figure checks into a Dallas software company rather than a coastal consumer app.
For all the funding, the thing Pinchev keeps coming back to is the customer conversation. Even as the CEO of a venture-backed company with a growing headcount, he still talks with customers and prospects daily to stay current on what contractors are actually dealing with. It is the source of the feedback loop he credits for the roadmap, and it is a habit many founders drop the moment their company gets big enough to have a product team do it for them.
What comes next is an open bet on whether AI belongs in the day-to-day of a small service business. Pinchev's wager with Operator AI and Chat AI is that the trades are a natural home for practical, useful automation - not to replace the technician in the field, but to make sure the phone gets answered, the lead gets captured, and the job gets on the calendar. If he is right, FieldPulse becomes less a piece of software a contractor logs into and more the quiet system running underneath the whole business.
We're focused on creating a better experience from start to finish.
Watch & listen
Pinchev has told the FieldPulse story in a handful of podcast interviews, including a conversation on the Appliance Alliance Podcast about building the company and serving the trades.