
Apurva Shrivastava is the co-founder and Co-CEO of Avoca, a New York AI company that builds voice and workflow agents for home services businesses like HVAC, plumbing, and roofing contractors. An MIT computer science graduate and second-time founder who built AI products at Apple and engineered at Retool, he and co-founder Tyson Chen pivoted from restaurants to the trades after a chance encounter at a Texas conference. By 2026 Avoca had crossed a $1 billion valuation, 800-plus customers, and $125M-plus raised from Kleiner Perkins, Meritech, and General Catalyst.
David Hsu is the founder and CEO of Retool, a San Francisco-based developer tools company that lets engineers build internal software through a drag-and-drop interface. He founded Retool in 2017 at age 25 after pivoting from a failed fintech startup (Cashew/Oatpay) where he kept having to build internal tools from scratch. A Computer Science and Philosophy graduate from Oxford, Hsu grew Retool to $2M ARR before public launch, achieved a $3.2B valuation by 2022 with $140M in total funding from Sequoia Capital and notable angels including the Stripe founders, and now serves over 10,000 companies including Amazon, Netflix, OpenAI, and the US Army.