Avoca co-founders on a $1 billion valuation, tomorrow’s CSRs, and AI’s trust dilemma 

In late April, home services-focused AI company Avoca announced that it has raised over $125 million in funding since its 2022 inception, most recently clinching a $1 billion valuation. 

While the milestone is notable, it also reflects the broader — and growing — adoption of AI among home service contractors nationwide, despite the industry’s reputation for being slower to embrace new technologies. 

Following the announcement, Homepros chatted via email with Avoca co-founders Tyson Chen and Apurva Shrivastava about deploying the company’s latest capital, AI’s impact on the CSR role, the technology’s trust dilemma, and more. Below is that conversation, lightly edited for brevity. 

You’re now valued at $1 billion after raising over $125 million. What does the latest capital actually unlock — what are you building now that you couldn’t before? 

The round doesn’t really change what we believe. It changes how much we can take on at once. 

We’ve always believed service businesses deserve software as good as what tech companies use internally. We started with calls and inbound communication because that’s where contractors were losing the most revenue. Now we can go deeper: Calls, follow-up, booking, customer communication, revenue visibility, and the workflows around all of it. 

It also lets us move faster. We can make bigger product bets, hire more of the engineers and field teams we need, and keep scaling customer success without letting quality slip. 

Where does Avoca still fall short today, and what’s the thinking on addressing that? 

When you’re bringing on a lot of new customers, it’s tough, but the capital will help us scale what’s been a real differentiator for us, which is our post-sale support, both on the technical side and relationship side. 

Another thing we want to improve is to allow contractors to do more with their data, whether it be understanding customer insights or general business performance, and what they can be doing better. 

AI has improved significantly over the past year — and especially the past 3 years — but how do you think about the overall “AI trust dilemma” among both contractors and consumers? 

For contractors, the bar is simple: Does Avoca book the job as well as, or better than, their best CSR? If it does, they’ll trust it. If it doesn’t, they shouldn’t. 

For consumers, most homeowners don’t start by asking whether it’s AI. They care whether the call gets answered, whether the person or system on the line knows what they’re talking about, and whether they get scheduled. If those things happen, the AI part matters less. If they don’t, people blame the AI quickly and fairly. 

So we don’t think trust comes from saying “AI is ready.” It comes from performance, call by call. 

Some of the best operators in the country have invested heavily in their CSR teams. What do you say to the owner who feels like Avoca is a bet against his people?

I don’t think that’s the right framing. The owners with the best CSR teams are often our best customers because they know what good looks like. They can tell quickly whether Avoca is helping or not. 

Great CSRs are still incredibly valuable. But they can’t answer every call, every night, every weekend, with no breaks and no missed volume. Avoca helps catch the demand the team can’t get to and frees the best people up for the work humans are better at: Tough customers, recovery calls, coaching, QA, and process improvements. 

Is the end state a world with fewer CSRs, or a world where CSRs do different work? Everyone says “both,” but I’m interested in your take. 

It’s both, but not in a vague way. There’ll probably be fewer CSRs in absolute terms for a given amount of call volume. A contractor that used to need six people for a certain workload may be able to handle much more volume with two or three. That’s how automation usually works. 

But the people who remain will do higher-value work. They’ll handle escalations, customer recovery, QA, AI training, outbound campaigns, and the edge cases where judgment matters. 

The CSR career path should get better, not worse. Less repetitive phone work, more customer operations, more revenue impact, and ideally better pay.

ServiceTitan is a partner — but you’re also building features that overlap with what they and others already do. How do you think about that tension? Do you end up competing directly with FSMs, and how should contractors think about that? 

ServiceTitan has built an impressive system, and the partnership works because we’re solving different problems. 

They’re the system of record for a lot of contractors: Jobs, dispatch, invoicing, payroll, and the core operating data. Avoca is the conversation layer. We handle the interactions with homeowners across calls, texts, follow-ups, and bookings. 

There’s always some overlap when companies grow. But practically, most operators don’t want to rip out their FSM to use AI. They want the best system for each job, integrated well. 

That’s how we think about it. If a contractor is on ServiceTitan, FieldEdge, Service Fusion, Housecall Pro, or another FSM, we integrate with it. We don’t ask them to start over. 

A chunk of your customer base is getting rolled up by private equity. When a PE platform acquires an independent contractor that’s already on Avoca, what happens? 

Well, first of all, there’s a good chance the acquiring platform is an Avoca customer, as we’re live and deployed in over half of the top 30 PE-backed platforms. 

Beyond that, the most common outcome is that the platform looks at the numbers and decides to roll Avoca out more broadly. If the acquired company has better booking rates, better call handling, and cleaner reporting, the platform usually wants that across more brands. 

Sometimes the opposite happens. The platform already has a preferred vendor, and the acquired company gets moved over. That’s part of the market.

Why do most contractors churn from Avoca, and how do you address and/or think about that? 

There are three main reasons. 

First, sometimes the customer’s operations weren’t ready. If the booking process is unclear or the team doesn’t have a consistent way to handle calls, AI won’t magically fix that. 

Second, dispatch and capacity logic can be wrong at go-live. For example, a contractor expects same-day booking for plumbing emergencies, but the scheduling system doesn’t reflect real capacity. The call may go well, but the operational follow-through breaks. Customers experience that as an Avoca failure, and in some sense, they’re right. 

Third, ownership changes. If a company gets acquired and the new owner has a different vendor strategy, we can lose the account even if performance is strong. 

What we see much less often is a contractor leaving because the AI simply couldn’t do the job. Churn is usually about readiness, implementation, or ownership changes. 

There are probably a dozen AI voice and CSR tools pitching contractors now. In your opinion, what separates the ones that will still exist in five years from the ones that won’t — and where does Avoca stand on that spectrum, honestly? 

We think three things matter. 

First, vertical depth. A generic AI receptionist isn’t enough. You need to understand how HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, and other service businesses actually work: Dispatch rules, memberships, warranties, emergency calls, financing, capacity, seasonality. 

Second, reliability. This isn’t a toy workflow. If the phone system fails, the contractor loses revenue immediately. The companies that survive will need real infrastructure, redundancy, monitoring, support, and accountability. 

Third, customer closeness. It’s easy to feel close to customers when you have 50 of them. It’s much harder as you scale. The companies that keep listening to operators, keep improving the product from real calls, and build strong implementation and success teams will have the advantage. 

As for Avoca, I think we’re in the group playing the long game. We’re not perfect, and there’s a lot we still need to improve, but we’ve been focused on this category deeply from the beginning. 

Do you guys plan to buy competitors in the future? 

We’ve had inbounds. Nothing imminent. If the right team and the right tech come along and it materially accelerates a roadmap area we care about, we’d consider it.