Ruchir Shah is the founder and CEO of SkillCat, a mobile-first training platform that has taught more than 300,000 people to enter skilled trades like HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and appliance repair. A Rice-trained energy engineer with a Stanford MBA, he started building animated industrial simulations after researching the BP oil spill and concluding that bad training kills. His first company, LearnToDrill, trained 25,000 oil and gas workers for clients like Halliburton and BP. When COVID threw skilled workers out of jobs while contractors begged for help, Shah pivoted to SkillCat to bridge that gap with simulation-based, $10-a-month trade education. He also runs the GRIT Foundation to introduce trades careers to underserved youth, and once spent a summer doing stand-up comedy in New York.
Stratus is a cloud-based BIM-to-fabrication platform built for MEP (mechanical, electrical, plumbing) contractors. It connects the digital model - Revit, AutoCAD and Autodesk Fabrication - to the prefab shop and the field, handling spooling, smart labeling, bend sheets, weld maps, material tracking and real-time productivity metrics so trade contractors can move from design to installed pipe, duct and conduit with less waste and fewer manual handoffs. Developed by GTP Software, Inc. (formerly GTP Services), Stratus serves large mechanical and sheet-metal contractors across North America and raised a $32M Series B in 2025.
Housecall Pro is an all-in-one, cloud-based business management platform built for home service professionals - plumbers, electricians, HVAC techs, cleaners, and other tradespeople. It folds scheduling, dispatching, invoicing, payments, marketing, and customer management into a single mobile-first app, increasingly layered with AI tools that answer calls, book jobs, and answer accounting questions. Founded in 2013 and headquartered in Denver, the company serves tens of thousands of service businesses and has powered well over 100 million completed jobs.