A Wharton graduate who started out pressure-washing homes with his dad in upstate New York has raised $40 million in venture capital to streamline the operations of mom-and-pop businesses with artificial intelligence.
George Eliadis built Probook, an AI operating system, with the needs of electricians, plumbers and HVAC technicians in mind. He said people running these types of businesses often find it difficult to efficiently dispatch their workers to the dozens of jobs they receive, which means they end up missing out on potential revenue.
“I started Probook to solve a problem in my own business,” Eliadis, 24, wrote on his company’s website. “I grew up pressure washing in upstate New York with my dad. Six summers in the truck. I spent two to three hours of my day driving between jobs. I’d be up on a ladder washing a house and miss calls because I couldn’t hear my phone ringing.”
After demonstrating his platform could boost profits for shops all around the country, Probook was able to raise a $34 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz and a $6 million seed led by Sequoia Capital, Fortune first reported.
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Eliadis said that home service businesses have been sold many AI tools over the last three years that operate without input from one another and only create more headaches.
“The problem isn’t AI. It’s that AI sat on top of a fragmented system. That’s what got us here,” Eliadis wrote on the company website. “The next decade will…will be won by the platform that runs the customer experience end to end, where AI does the bulk of the work and your team manages the exceptions. Not five tools and three vendors. One platform that runs it all.”
Eliadis claims to have built a single platform capable of managing everything from answering calls, cleaning up job data, sending updates to customers.
An Indiana-based repair service with 14 locations and 260 technicians across the Midwest booked 2,873 jobs in their first month on Probook with zero human intervention, according to the company.
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After using Probook for eight months, a similar business in Kansas was able to boost its revenue by 10% per job with a 40% smaller team, the company said.
Probook is also selling directly to private equity firms that are rolling up home service businesses and looking to maximize margins through automation.
From the customer perspective, Sequoia Capital described Probook as an easier, faster way to book repairs for your home.
“Your water heater goes out, and you call a local plumbing company that runs on the platform. Probook’s AI picks up immediately, already knowing each technician’s experience, availability and distance from your home, along with their close rates and ticket sizes. It assigns the right tech to the job, alerts them, and keeps you in the loop with an ETA,” Konstantine Buhler, a partner at Sequoia, wrote in a recent blog post.
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The only thing Eliadis hasn’t figured out how to deal with going forward is ServiceTitan, the $6.3 billion publicly-traded behemoth that operates in exactly the same field as Probook.
ServiceTitan has its own AI scheduling product, and for now, Probook is listed as a ServiceTitan partner, according to Fortune. This means the two firms work together and don’t necessarily compete.
However, the leaders at Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital believe in Eliadis because he has worked in the trades before, while also having the mindset of a Silicon Valley founder.
“Most founders building for the trades have never worked in them. George has,” Buhler told Fortune.
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