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When Marcelle Flowers\u2019 staff told her that two students were waiting at the counter of her Sacramento plumbing shop, she grabbed her wallet. She assumed they were selling chocolate bars for a soccer team.<\/p>\n
\u201cI literally said, you have five minutes,\u201d recalled Flowers, now 62 years old. It was June 2024, and a deal to sell her business, Armstrong Plumbing, had fallen through months earlier. She was also \u201creally opposed to AI,\u201d she told Fortune. She feared it would take her people and \u201ctake all the jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n
The visitors were AJ Jain and Aditya Ketkar, two engineers in their mid-twenties whose energy startup had just fizzled. They had spent that spring walking into about 140 contractors\u2019 shops across Northern California, carrying a diary instead of laptops and offering no sales pitch.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople were not treating us like salesmen,\u201d Jain said. \u201cCurious kids was, like, our persona,\u201d <\/p>\n
They had built exactly one thing worth showing: an automated appointment-reminder call for a San Francisco electrician.<\/p>\n
Two years later, their company, Broccoli AI, has raised $52 million across its Series A and Series B. Khosla Ventures led both rounds, with Y Combinator and Operator Partners also participating. The raise was $22 million in Series A and $30 million in Series B, nine months apart, Jain, the company\u2019s cofounder and CEO, told Fortune.<\/p>\n
The Series A had not previously been announced. Broccoli is valued at $300 million post-money, according to a person familiar with the matter (Broccoli declined to comment on its valuation). The company had earlier raised $1.5 million in a seed round after going through Y Combinator.<\/p>\n
And Marcelle Flowers is now working with the company. She got an apartment in San Francisco to work for them, and her life changed. <\/p>\n
\u201cIf you had told me that I\u2019d be running an AI company in the heart of San Francisco I would have laughed you out of the room,\u201d Flowers said. \u201cLike, furthest thing from my mind.\u201d<\/p>\n
What the company sells<\/p>\n
Broccoli sells AI agents to plumbing, HVAC, and electrical companies. They answer inbound calls, book jobs directly into the scheduling software the contractor already uses, follow up on open estimates, and renew service memberships.<\/p>\n
The company says more than 1,500 businesses now use it, including Ace Hardware Home Services, Mr. Electric, and Any Hour Group. In the past seven months it has added roofing, pool care, garage doors, home improvement, and exteriors.<\/p>\n
Revenue has tripled since the Series A, Jain said, and headcount has grown from 15 people as of 12 months ago to more than 150. The company said the new money will go toward hiring engineers and salespeople as well as speeding up product development.<\/p>\n
Owners wanted someone to answer the phone after the office emptied out at 5 p.m., close the books, and chase the estimates technicians wrote up, Jain said. The company says its AI does work equivalent to roughly 30% of a typical contractor\u2019s office staff.<\/p>\n
\u2018The American Dream is still alive\u2019<\/p>\n
Jain, 27, is the first engineer in a family of business owners on both sides. He and Ketkar met at BITS Pilani in India in 2016 and have been starting companies together since 2017: a delivery app for closed college campuses, an interview-prep boot camp, and, after Y Combinator, a universal API for electric vehicles that took them to London. They signed eight customers there in two years. \u201cWe couldn\u2019t scale that business, even after raising a seed round from YC,\u201d Jain said.<\/p>\n
They arrived in San Francisco in January 2024. That May and June they went door to door across the Bay Area, then Stockton, Lodi, Modesto, and Sacramento. They wanted an owner to build with.<\/p>\n
At the utilities they had worked with before, Jain explained, he used to deal with product managers at 5,000-person companies. A contractor-owner, on the other hand, \u201ccares about solving their customer\u2019s problem.\u201d Owners took them along on smoke breaks and told them how their fathers had started the business.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe surprising thing is the American Dream is still alive,\u201d Jain said, describing himself and Ketkar as two curious strangers who were met with trust and openness. \u201cNo one looked at our accents, our color.\u201d<\/p>\n
The turning point was when they met Flowers, who gave them five minutes that changed their lives, Jain said. It was eerie since it almost didn\u2019t happen; Armstrong Plumbing was the only cold call they made twice. <\/p>\n
They played her a recording of their one product, an automated call reminding customers of upcoming appointments. Flowers had just lost the employee who made those calls for her shop and hadn\u2019t replaced her. \u201cThat hooks me,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Once the product worked for Flowers, her word of mouth took Broccoli from one customer to 10, and the door-knocking stopped. \u201cShe was the operator who helped us create this,\u201d Jain said. \u201cShe\u2019s the soul of the company.\u201d<\/p>\n
The woman at the counter<\/p>\n
To understand this unlikely alliance, it helps to understand where Flowers came from. Born in 1963, she grew up in a blue-collar family in Anaheim, Calif., one of five children. Her father was a commercial plumber who built restaurants, hotels, and schools, and plumbers were regulars at the family breakfast table, while her mother stayed home. \u201cVery, very much Brady Bunch family,\u201d Flowers said.<\/p>\n
She was the middle child and the \u201chell-raiser.\u201d At 14, she sat her parents down at dinner and told them they were done raising her. \u201cFrom here on out, I got this,\u201d she recalled saying, describing herself as \u201cbarely a high school graduate.\u201d She got pregnant at 19, had her son at 20, and raised him as a single mother. \u201cI really went sideways for a while,\u201d she said. She found her faith at 26.<\/p>\n
She has a name for that stretch of life, roughly ages 16 to 26: \u201cthe stupid stage.\u201d Decades of hiring young tradesmen gave her patience for men still in it. \u201cI have a lot of grace for people because I was one of those,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
She joined her father\u2019s company in 1995, then opened its residential service-and-repair business in 2011. She said she grew it from about $1 million to $8 million in seven years with no outside capital, operating in a \u201cvery male-dominated\u201d field.<\/p>\n
COVID hit hard. She said she was sick for about nine months with long COVID, and the business \u201ctanked.\u201d She had already battled cancer twice, she said, both times diagnosed as terminal, and was not expected to live past 35. \u201cI have been through hell and high water in my life,\u201d she said. After she failed to sell the business in 2023, something told her to \u201cwait till June,\u201d and that\u2019s when she met the Broccoli boys. Then a five-minute pitch turned into a half-hour consultation.<\/p>\n
Within two days, Flowers recalled, Jain and Ketkar had loaded the reminder bot with her scripts. But her real pain was the answering service. She was paying $5,000 a month for one that booked jobs into her software 33% of the time and asked whether the founders could do for inbound calls what they\u2019d done for outbound. \u201cWe had that in 10 days,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
For about three months, Jain said, the founders stopped writing code in San Francisco and began doing it from Flowers\u2019 shop in Sacramento while she explained how a contracting business worked. \u201cThey didn\u2019t speak trade,\u201d Flowers said. \u201cThey knew nothing about a plunger and a toilet.\u201d She became their first customer, then an adviser, then COO. <\/p>\n
Fans of AMC\u2019s Halt and Catch Fire series will recognize the arrangement. In the show, John Bosworth, the Texas computer-company salesman played by Toby Huss, ends up running the business side of a startup founded by a far younger coder: part operator, part surrogate parent. She also designed the logo, the brand colors, and the first trade-show booth. \u201cIn my own heart they were like my two kids,\u201d Flowers said of her ostensible bosses. \u201cI didn\u2019t assume the mom role. I probably did a little bit.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018Not taking away jobs\u2019<\/p>\n
Jain and Flowers both say AI is a teammate rather than a replacement. Jain said a call-center representative at a Utah customer threatened to quit if the owner and his wife took Broccoli away. \u201cIt\u2019s not taking away jobs,\u201d Jain said. \u201cIt\u2019s making jobs.\u201d Owners who never took vacations now do, he said.<\/p>\n
Still, Jain acknowledged limits to what he\u2019s built. The AI is \u201cmaybe good at like 80% of the tasks,\u201d he said, with the other 20% needing human judgment. Emergencies such as a flooding basement or a fire go to people in the contractor\u2019s office.<\/p>\n
Jain sees Broccoli as a \u201cbusiness in a box\u201d that could let a young technician in, say, Columbus, Ohio, start a company without first hiring a receptionist and a bookkeeper. <\/p>\n
By his telling, Broccoli has built maybe 1% of what it plans to, and his company competes with the AI labs \u201cnot just for talent, even for real estate,\u201d Jain said. Its San Francisco office shares a parking lot with Cognition, and at least 30% of his engineers still work on-site with customers. Jain said he was in Utah visiting a customer the week before and was headed to Arkansas that Sunday to visit another. <\/p>\n
\u201cHalf of the week is an existing customer who we are working with on a product that we\u2019ve not even released yet,\u201d he said. \u201cWe are at a scale which is, like, a growth-stage company, but you\u2019re still in the zero-to-one phase because there\u2019s so much more to build.\u201d<\/p>\n
#Meet #Baby #Boomer #life #changed #Gen #founders #walked #plumbing #business #COO<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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