Founder · CEO · Topline Pro
Nick
Nick
Ornitz
A chemical engineer who left Harvard Business School to build an AI team for the people who fix your roof.
The guy quietly arming Main Street
A chemical engineer who left Harvard Business School to build an AI team for the people who fix your roof.
The guy quietly arming Main Street
The customer Nick Ornitz cares about most is a landscaper who has been running a thriving business on a paper calendar and a flip phone, turning away work because there is no one to call back the leads. Ornitz runs Topline Pro to fix exactly that. The New York company sells a generative-AI platform to roofers, painters, cleaners, electricians and landscapers - the trades that built the country and got skipped by the software boom that rewired everyone else's job.
His framing is deliberately unglamorous. Topline Pro, he says, "isn't just a tool - it's a full-time AI team behind the scenes." The AI handles the online presence, answers the booking requests, qualifies the leads, sends the quotes, schedules the jobs and chases the invoices. The pro stays in the field. To date the platform has driven more than $655 million in booked work for its customers across all 50 states, and Ornitz raised a $27 million Series B led by Northzone in 2025 to push deeper into agentic AI.
He came to this from an unlikely direction. Ornitz trained as a chemical engineer at Cornell, graduating in 2016, then went into the construction industry working on building technologies with a focus on go-to-market and sales. The trades were not an abstraction he discovered in a market map. His own siblings ran service businesses, still managing operations on pen and paper, and those kitchen-table conversations became the founding insight.
Our vision is simple: pros focus on their craft, and our AI runs the business in the background.- Nick Ornitz, Co-Founder & CEO
Ornitz met co-founder Shannon Kay as an MBA student at Harvard Business School. Their first venture, Dwelling, was a home-maintenance tele-consulting service. It turned into ProPhone, a product that connected contractors and homeowners over video chat, and the pair went through Y Combinator's Winter 2021 batch on the strength of it. Both of them dropped out of Harvard to do it.
Then the customers told them what the business actually was. The plumbers using ProPhone kept asking for the same thing, over and over: more job leads. Not better video. Not slicker scheduling. Leads. Ornitz and Kay realized the real money was not in connecting one homeowner to one plumber, but in helping the plumber grow past word-of-mouth entirely. In February 2022 they rebranded to Topline Pro and rebuilt the product around generative AI that could spin up an SEO-optimized website, sync local listings, run social media and collect payments - fast and cheap enough for a one-person crew.
The early numbers vindicated the turn. Within ten months of launching a subscription product starting at $75 a month, Topline Pro had generated over $25 million in job requests across more than 1,000 monthly subscriber businesses. A $5 million seed led by Bonfire Ventures followed, then $12 million more, then the $27 million Series B. By the latest round, total funding stood at $44 million.
Graduates Cornell with a degree in chemical engineering. Brother of Sigma Pi, Mu Chapter.
Meets Shannon Kay at Harvard Business School; they launch Dwelling.
ProPhone connects contractors and homeowners by video. Goes through YC Winter 2021.
Rebrands to Topline Pro; $5M seed led by Bonfire Ventures.
Forbes 30 Under 30, Enterprise Tech. CNBC SMB Tech 50. Raises another $12M.
$27M Series B led by Northzone. $655M booked work, all 50 states.
Earned and paid media, SEO, social and reputation management - building an online presence for businesses that never had time to.
24/7 customer communication, lead qualification and conversion, so a missed call no longer means a missed job.
Scheduling, messaging, quoting and follow-up on payments - the back office, handled in the background.
"We've built agents that think and work on behalf of our pros so they can stay in the field while the business handles itself in the background." - Nick Ornitz
Named to the 2023 Enterprise Technology list alongside co-founder Shannon Kay.
Led by Northzone in 2025, with Forerunner, Bonfire, TMV and Flybridge returning. $44M raised in total.
Total work booked through the platform for home service businesses, across nearly every state.
Built and scaled through YC, where the company is described as a "generative-AI powered Shopify for home service pros."
Recognized on CNBC's list of the most innovative startups serving small and medium businesses.
From solo contractors to teams under ten, served by the same internal AI tooling.
He is a chemical engineer by training. The path from reaction kinetics to AI for roofers is not a straight line.
He dropped out of Harvard Business School - and so did his co-founder Shannon Kay. They left together.
The company has had three names: Dwelling, then ProPhone, then Topline Pro.
His first market research was his own siblings, who ran service businesses on pen and paper.
The whole strategy turned on listening: the plumbers kept asking for leads, so the leads became the product.
His stated target is the "base layer" for 2.5 million small businesses - most of them one person.
We're building Topline Pro to be the base layer powering the success of over 2.5 million small businesses, most of them solo operators, by pushing the boundaries of agentic technology.- Nick Ornitz
Sources: Topline Pro, Y Combinator, VentureFizz, TechCrunch, PR Newswire, Bonfire Ventures, BBG Ventures, Forbes. Facts current as of mid-2026.