servicetitan
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Joseph Elias Phillips puts a family-business instinct into the machinery of money
A grandfather’s jewelry business, a friendship forged in a Miami salsa club, and a lesson at ServiceTitan led Joseph Elias Phillips to co-found Payabli. His wager: help software companies handle the money already moving through their customers’ lives.
Ara Mahdessian and the work that followed Dad home
His father finished the job, then came home to another shift of paperwork. Ara Mahdessian built ServiceTitan with Vahe Kuzoyan to give contractors a different kind of working day.
Bryan Olshock Learned to Read a Scorecard. Now He Reads a Market.
Before he led marketing for the software platform serving the trades, Bryan Olshock chased pars, built a company during college and learned to make difficult data intelligible. His career is a study in keeping score without confusing the score for the game.
Winston Chi
Winston Chi is the co-founder and CEO of NOSO Labs, a Y Combinator (Summer 2025) startup building AI agents that help home-services field technicians diagnose problems, close sales, and handle paperwork. A two-time founder focused on vertical AI, he previously started Butter Technologies, a food-wholesale software platform acquired by GrubMarket in 2024. With NOSO he is aiming the same playbook at the trades, starting with HVAC.
Why Everyone Is Building the HVAC Chatbot
Five AI-native startups and every major field-service platform are racing to build the same product: an AI assistant that sits in a technician's pocket and answers questions about the air conditioner in front of them. The technicians are a proxy. The real contest is whether a thin AI layer on an underserved dataset can survive once the platform that already owns the customer relationship copies the feature for free. HVAC is the smallest, clearest test of a question every vertical AI founder is asking: does depth beat distribution?
Arch
Arch is a San Francisco startup building AI marketing and revenue software for home-services contractors - the HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and drain businesses that keep American homes running. Founded in 2023 by Phil Krinner and Sacha Schmitz, Arch plugs into ServiceTitan and public property data to find homeowners likely to need work, catch customers about to churn, and auto-generate email and direct-mail campaigns. The company began by tackling the grunt work of heat-pump sizing and quoting, and has since broadened into an 'autonomous revenue engine' aimed at helping small contractors grow without a marketing department. It raised $6.2M in seed funding in February 2024 from Coatue, Floodgate, Gigascale Capital, ReGen Ventures, and MCJ Collective.
Avoca
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
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
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
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
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.