Avoca Hits $1B Valuation With $125M+ Raise to Bring AI Voice Agents to HVAC and Plumbing (April 27, 2026)

AI voice-agent startup Avoca on April 27, 2026 announced more than $125 million raised across Seed, Series A and Series B at a $1 billion valuation, with the new Series B co-led by Meritech Capital Partners and General Catalyst. The New York–based company says its agents now handle phone, SMS, chat and email for more than 800 home-service operators in HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing and adjacent trades.

What Happened

Avoca's funding announcement consolidated three rounds. Y Combinator led a 2024 seed; Kleiner Perkins led the Series A; and the new Series B is co-led by Meritech and General Catalyst, pushing total funding past $125 million at a $1 billion post-money valuation. The company has not disclosed how the latest round breaks out by stage, but Fortune reported on April 27 that the Series B alone is the largest of the three.

Co-founders Tyson Chen (CEO) and Apurva Shrivastava (CTO) met at an MIT poker night and started Avoca after Chen — previously an autonomy engineer at Nuro — spent years answering phones at his mother's acupuncture clinic and watched small businesses bleed revenue every time a call went unanswered. Their breakthrough customer was a Dallas HVAC operator called Rescue Air, who tracked them down at a restaurant trade conference in Texas in 2023 and effectively recruited the founders into the trades.

Key Details

• $125M+ total raised, $1B valuation — Series B co-led by Meritech and General Catalyst, Series A led by Kleiner Perkins, seed led by Y Combinator (2024).
• 800+ customers — including 1-800-GOT-JUNK?, Goettl, Turnpoint and Rescue Air, plus partnerships with ServiceTitan, Nexstar Network and Clover.
• $1B in jobs booked in 2026 — the company says its agents are on track to book a billion dollars of work for customers this year.
• Eight-figure ARR in 2025 — Avoca crossed $10M+ in annual recurring revenue last year.
• Vertical AI for the trades — the agents handle inbound chat, voice calls, SMS and email, plus outbound estimate follow-ups and dispatch.

What Developers and Operators Are Saying

The reaction in the home-services community has been notably enthusiastic. On the ServiceTitan operator forum and the r/HVAC subreddit, contractors are sharing stories of moving from "70 % of after-hours calls go to voicemail" to "every call gets answered and a job booked", with several operators reporting added six-figure annual revenue from previously missed calls. The skeptical thread on Hacker News — reacting to the Fortune profile — is more typical: commenters note that vertical AI for the trades is suddenly a crowded category (Same.dev, Goodcall, Rilla, Sierra and others are all in adjacent spots), and that whoever wins must integrate deeply with field-service software like ServiceTitan rather than just bolting an LLM onto the phone line.

What This Means for the Services Economy

Avoca's $1B valuation is a marker for an investment thesis that did not exist two years ago: vertical AI agents priced against the labour they replace, sold into industries that have historically been called "boring". Service trades in the U.S. employ roughly 7 million workers and miss an estimated 30 % of inbound calls during business hours. Avoca's bet — and the bet of Kleiner, Meritech and General Catalyst behind it — is that vertical-specific agents trained on dispatcher transcripts will outperform horizontal voice platforms for these operators, and that the ServiceTitan/Clover/Nexstar integration moat will be hard to copy after the fact.

What's Next

Avoca says the Series B will fund hiring (NYC and Santa Barbara), an expansion of the agent suite into outbound sales calls, and deeper integrations with field-service platforms beyond ServiceTitan. The company's launch post mentions a planned international rollout, starting with English-language markets, before the end of 2026.

Sources

• PR Newswire press release — primary funding announcement (April 27, 2026)
• Fortune profile — founder backstory and Rescue Air origin
• Avoca's own announcement post — product detail and roadmap
• Y Combinator company page — seed-round context
• The SaaS News — SaaS market context for the round
• AI Automation Global — vertical-AI competitive landscape commentary