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

Speaker 1: A lot of capital being deployed today.

Speaker 2: It is a boom time.

Speaker 1: Being announced.

Speaker 2: It's a boom time. Well, we are very fortunate to have our next guest here. We are in the TBPN UltraDome. How are you doing? Welcome to the show.

Speaker 18: Hey, guys. I'm doing well. How are you?

Speaker 2: Thanks so much for taking the time. Beautiful.

Speaker 1: We are doing great, but don't think we're doing office is right there.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Introduce yourself and the company, please.

Speaker 18: Yep. So my name is Apurva. I'm the founder and co CEO of Evoca. Yeah. We're basically building AI agents for physical service businesses, primarily, for example, home services where we've seen a lot of traction. And my cofounder is Tyson, and we started this business together in 2022.

Speaker 2: Cool. 2022.

Speaker 1: What did you see? Yeah. What what Were

Speaker 2: you thinking just like SaaS and then it just got a lot better with the AI tailwind?

Speaker 18: Well, it's kind of interesting. So this kind of happened during the time that the models that created ChatGeBT had come out, but ChatGeBT itself Yeah. Wasn't yet out.

Speaker 2: Yeah. GPT three was getting a lot better. Like 3.5 was like basically out. Da Vinci, like stuff was starting to work, but it was a little bit rough, but you could see glimpses.

Speaker 18: Exactly. Yep. So this is the time when like Da Vinci was out Yeah. But then you didn't really have the consumer adoption of ChatGPT yet. Mhmm. And, yeah, during that period of time, something interesting about both me and my cofounder is that we both came from backgrounds where so I grew up in Michigan. Tyson grew up in Pennsylvania. We We basically grew up in backgrounds where our moms owned these service businesses and we actually used to do the this kind of job every day where we'd have to actually be picking up phone calls, booking customers, figuring out how to properly book them, all of that fun stuff. And so we essentially, after we did that, I think when I saw AI was getting really good, I was immediately like, wait. I feel like businesses like that will have so much value and no one's really looking into it. And so we were like, what does it look like to bring value here? And we thought, let's start with the phone call.

Speaker 2: Okay. Oh, the phone call. Okay. Yeah. I I want to know more about just the data ingest points because you can imagine like, you know, ERPs, custom ERPs, CRMs. There's a lot of different touch points and you could even go into photos and three d scans of things that are going on in the physical world. But where is the beachhead? Where is like the light bulb moment for your customers?

Speaker 18: Yeah. So it's kind of like multiple phases. Would say for our customers, if you think about it, like our customers, their customers are basically just like us. You know, anytime we need like a new job for plumbing, new AC, etcetera, things like that, they're coming through a lot of source. So phone calls is actually how many businesses get most of the revenue.

Speaker 2: Yep.

Speaker 18: And then there's also like lead aggregators, some people are texting. And so, Avoca, we wanna first our first phase is like essentially responding and closing every lead, which is like how do we get you any lead that's coming from like Angie's for example. People often think of as a war room because now every single person's like fighting for that person. So we can have an AI that'll go respond to that lead immediately. We can have an AI that picks up every single phone call Mhmm. And sticks the script, does what you need, close that customer.

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 18: Then there's kind of like a second phase, which is like, how do you, you know, figure out your capacity and get new customers? So based based off of what kind of availabilities and jobs you have, can you go reach out to the existing base? Who should you target to kind of, you know, fill up your board?

Speaker 2: Yeah. Our our voice models at a ChatGPT moment now, I had a really great experience booking a restaurant reservation at Fogo De Chao, Bain Capital backed. No surprises there. But but it but, you know, like I have grown up my entire life like do not talk to the robot, do not reject the clanker, demand the human, press 0 a bunch. But it feels like we're starting to see glimpses of magical experiences. How close are we? Have we crossed the Turing test? Do you have data on any of this? Like, how is it going on that front?

Speaker 18: Yeah. Absolutely. So we have now crossed the point where, like, if you wanted to, for the first thirty seconds to a minute of a conversation, people would not be able to tell that they're talking to an AI because the models have just gotten so good. But still to this day, we are not yet at like the point where we're at with text where you could literally have, you know, minutes long conversations because eventually the AI sounds robotic. It takes, like, an extra hundred milliseconds to respond, interrupts you when you're speaking, all those kinds of things. So we're not yet at the moment where it's like, oh, everything is gonna switch over, but we're at the moment where, in fact, you can have very good conversations. You can pick up the phone within a second and super efficient. Like, these average calls actually last about 30% faster than calls that humans would take. So it's even more efficient.

Speaker 2: Okay. Yeah. That's great. Tell us about the round.

Speaker 1: Any any any of these different is there is there you have roofing, HVAC, plumbing. Is there a category that is more resistant to AI? Like, plumbers like, nah, I'm good. More than electricians or HVAC? Or is it is it pretty and and what is general sentiment across the board?

Speaker 18: Yeah. I mean, it's a great question. So I think like, the initial thought would be that, oh, people are probably not too excited about adopting AI or whatever AI is evil. But in fact, the nice part about our business is that the AI is not the main character of the job.

Speaker 13: What the main AI is doing is just making

Speaker 18: sure everything gets booked, making sure their customers are happy, making sure you're always getting new customers. But the main characters are actually the plumbers, the technicians, the, you know, HVAC guys. And so they are actually I mean, I would split them split them into multiple buckets, but a lot of them are very hungry and eager to actually adopt AI right now because they already see the overhead of like, oh, shoot. I forgot to follow-up with that customer or oh, wow. I can't believe we dropped that customer on their phone call. And so an AI can go in and solve that. They can do their job. They're still running the show, and the AI can help facilitate that. So still seeing actually really good adoption there.

Speaker 2: Cool. Tell us about the round. You raised a bunch of money. What happened?

Speaker 18: Yeah. So we actually this is our first time going public, so we're very happy and honored to be here. We've now raised a 125,000,000 at latest million dollar valuation. Congratulations.

Speaker 1: First time going public as in coming out of stealth. Right?

Speaker 18: Yeah. I mean, we were all all over LinkedIn, but we had never did a single press release. And so, Fortune

Speaker 2: Got the Inclusive. Let's go.

Speaker 1: They're like, let's just wait let's just wait till we till we hit a billion.

Speaker 2: Very impressive. Very, very good good progress. Congratulations and thank you so much for taking the time to come hang out.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Great to meet you.

Speaker 2: Congrats on Awesome. Goodbye.

Speaker 18: Cool.

Speaker 2: Cheers. Up next, we have an Anand joining. We have Bubble Boy. I believe Bubble Boy is in the waiting room. Let's bring Bubble Boy in to the TBPN UltraDome.