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.
Avoca is a New York-based AI platform for America's services economy. It builds AI agents that answer calls, texts, chats and emails, book jobs, follow up on estimates and coach human reps for HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, pest control and other trades. Founded in 2022 by Tyson Chen and Apurva Shrivastava after a chance encounter with a Dallas HVAC company, Avoca pivoted from restaurants to the trades when it realized a missed call could mean losing a $30,000 install. In April 2026 it raised $125M+ across Seed, Series A and Series B at a $1 billion valuation, and is on track to book $1 billion in jobs in a single year.
Jake Olsen, P.E. is the CEO of Stratus, the leading cloud software platform for MEP (mechanical, electrical, and plumbing) contractors, helping hundreds of firms digitize workflows from BIM design through fabrication to field installation. A serial entrepreneur with over 20 years in construction technology, Olsen previously co-founded DADO - a construction document management startup that was acquired by Stanley Black & Decker - and also built Hangerworks, DEWALT Design Assist, and Powercalc Anchor Design. He steered Stratus to a $32 million Series B funding round in January 2025 led by Radian Capital, positioning the company as the connective tissue between the design table, fabrication shop, and job site in the evolving era of data-driven MEP contracting.