plumbing
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Evan Brown
Evan Brown is the CEO and co-founder of Rebar, a New York vertical-AI company building an operating system for the HVAC, electrical, and plumbing trades. Rebar's platform reads blueprints and spec books, pulls out tens of thousands of data points per project, and turns estimating and quoting work that once took days into a task of minutes. Brown grew up in his uncle's HVAC supplier office and later spent years as an estimator and sales engineer before starting Rebar in October 2024 with Andrew Schwartz. In March 2026 the company closed a $14M Series A led by Prudence.
Ruchir Shah
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.
Jake Olsen
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.