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.
Mark Hoadley is the co-founder and CEO of Hauler Hero, a vertical software company building cloud-native, AI-powered tools for the waste and recycling industry - CRM, dispatch, routing, billing and customer portals for the haulers that pick up the trash. A former ServiceTitan sales leader, he and brother-in-law Ben Sikma launched the company in 2020 after watching how outdated the software running garbage trucks really was. Hauler Hero now serves more than 200 hauling companies and has facilitated roughly 35 million trash pickups, raising a $16M Series A led by Frontier Growth in early 2026.
Charlie Warren is a startup founder-turned-investor who built Convex, a commercial services software platform, from a garage bootstrapping sprint through $60M in venture funding and a YC Top Companies nod, before selling to ServiceTitan in 2024. Today he serves as a Visiting Partner at Y Combinator, bringing hard-won founder experience to the next wave of vertical SaaS builders. His unusual arc - Goldman Sachs to energy policy to enterprise software - gives him a perspective on markets that most investors simply don't have.
Byron Deeter is a Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners and one of the defining voices in cloud and SaaS investing over the past two decades. A former founder who built and sold Trigo Technologies to IBM, he brings hard-won operator empathy to backing companies like Twilio, DocuSign, Box, ServiceTitan, Canva, and Anthropic - with 26 unicorn investments and 13 IPOs to his name. A four-time NCAA rugby national champion and former Ironman triathlete, Deeter applies an athlete's discipline to both portfolio management and founder wellness, having created STRIVE, Bessemer's holistic health program for CEOs. He is also a minority owner of the San Francisco 49ers.
Nina Achadjian is a Partner at Index Ventures, one of the world's leading VC firms, where she invests at seed, venture, and growth stages with a focus on AI, robotics, software for hardware, and vertical SaaS. A Harvard-educated former bond trader and Google AdSense leader, she founded HIVE Ventures — the first seed fund for Armenian entrepreneurs — before joining Index. Her portfolio includes Anthropic, ServiceTitan (IPO 2024), Gong, Physical Intelligence, and 20+ other companies. Known for backing category-defining vertical software companies years before they become mainstream, she sits on 24+ company boards.