Avoca raises $125M at unicorn valuation to deploy AI agents for home services businesses — first time out of stealth

Avoca raises $125M at unicorn valuation to deploy AI agents for home services businesses — first time out of stealth

Avoca, an AI agent platform for home services businesses, has raised $125M at a valuation above $1B. Founded in 2022 by Apurva Shrivastava and co-CEO Tyson, the company is coming out of stealth — it never issued a press release despite operating for three years.

The product targets HVAC, plumbing, roofing, and similar trades, handling the work that typically falls through the cracks: answering inbound calls, responding to leads from aggregators like Angi, and proactively reaching out to existing customers to fill open capacity. Shrivastava describes it in two phases — first, closing every lead that comes in; second, using job availability data to identify which existing customers to re-engage.

“We've now raised $125,000,000 at [unicorn] valuation... We're basically building AI agents for physical service businesses, primarily home services where we've seen a lot of traction... These average calls actually last about 30% faster than calls that humans would take.”

Voice quality and AI adoption

Shrivastava says Avoca's voice agents now pass as human for the first thirty seconds to a minute of a call, but multi-minute conversations still break down — extra latency, robotic cadence, and interruption issues remain unsolved. Despite that ceiling, he says Avoca's AI-handled calls run about 30% faster than calls taken by humans.

Adoption resistance has been lower than expected. Shrivastava argues the AI is a background operator, not a replacement for the technician. Plumbers and HVAC contractors are the main characters; the AI just makes sure no call goes unanswered and no lead goes cold. That framing, he says, has driven genuine demand from a customer base that already feels the pain of missed follow-ups and dropped calls.

The founding story is grounded in direct experience: both Shrivastava and Tyson grew up with mothers who owned service businesses, and both spent time answering phones and booking jobs before starting Avoca. They began building when GPT-3.5 and Da Vinci were showing early promise but ChatGPT had not yet launched publicly — early enough to see the opportunity before the consumer AI wave made it obvious.