How a chance encounter in Texas sparked a $1 billion Kleiner Perkins-backed AI startup

Tyson Chen and Apurva Shrivastava were chasing restaurants when they found an HVAC company. 

The two engineers had first met at MIT poker night and built an AI system to handle missed calls—originally, they thought this made sense for restaurants, specifically. But, as Chen and Shrivastava wandered a Texas restaurant conference, a Dallas heating and air company called Rescue Air found them.

“When a restaurant misses a phone call, that’s a $30, $40 order,” said Chen. “When a home service business misses a phone call, that could be a $30,000, $40,000 HVAC install they’re missing. So, instantly, we thought: ‘wait, this is a completely different order of magnitude.’”

Chen and Shrivastava already were in town, and spent an afternoon with Rescue Air: “We realized in those few hours that if we could solve this problem well for Rescue Air, it could be massive,” Chen added. 

For three months in 2023, Chen and Shrivastava built a product especially for Rescue Air—who then helped them find the first several customers for their startup Avoca, which builds AI agents helping physical services businesses take inbound calls, schedule, follow up on estimates, and run dispatch. The universe of businesses Avoca serves—HVAC, plumbing, roofing, and electrical businesses—isn’t the most online. It was network effects, trade shows, and conferences that got them to their first 10 customers, and to the more than 800 customers they........

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