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A Wharton graduate who started pressure washing homes with his father in upstate New York has raised $40 million in venture capital to use artificial intelligence to streamline operations at his family business.
George Eliadis built Probook, an AI operating system, with the needs of electricians, plumbers, and HVAC technicians in mind. He said people who run these types of businesses often find it difficult to efficiently deploy employees to the dozens of jobs they have available, and end up missing out on potential revenue.
“I started Probook to solve a problem in my business,” Eliadis, 24, wrote on the company’s website. “I grew up pressure washing with my dad in upstate New York. I spent six summers in a truck. Between jobs, I would spend two to three hours a day in my car. I would be up on a ladder cleaning houses, and sometimes I would miss a call because I couldn’t hear the phone ring.”
After proving its platform had the potential to boost profits for stores across the country, ProBook was able to raise a $34 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz and a $6 million seed round led by Sequoia Capital, Fortune first reported.
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HVAC technician is performing maintenance on an air conditioning unit on the side of a modern house. (Welcome / iStock Getty Images Plus / iStock)
Eliadis said many AI tools have been sold to home service companies over the past three years, but they work without input from each other, only creating more headaches.
“The problem isn’t AI; it’s AI sitting on top of a fragmented system. That’s what got us here,” Eliadis wrote on the company’s website. “The next decade…will be won by platforms that run the customer experience end-to-end. AI does the bulk of the work and teams manage the exceptions. Not five tools and three vendors. One platform to do it all.”
Eliadis claims to have built a single platform that can manage everything from answering calls, cleaning up job data, to sending updates to customers.
The Indiana repair service, which has 14 locations and 260 technicians across the Midwest, booked 2,873 jobs with Probook in its first month without any human intervention, according to the company.
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Plumber repairs the sink in the house. (Photographics/Getty Images)
After eight months of using Probook, a similar company in Kansas was able to increase revenue per job by 10% with a 40% smaller team, the company says.
Probook also sells directly to private equity firms with home services businesses looking to maximize profits through automation.
Sequoia Capital explained that from a customer perspective, Probook is an easier and faster way to schedule home repairs.
“When your water heater breaks, we call the local plumbing companies running on our platform. Probook’s AI responds instantly, already knowing each technician’s experience, availability, distance from your home, win rate and ticket size. It assigns the right technician to the job, alerts you, and keeps you up to date on ETAs,” Sequoia partner Konstantine Buhler wrote in a recent blog post.
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An electrician works on installing an electrical wiring system in a new house (pictured). (Welcome / iStock Getty Images Plus / iStock)
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The only thing Eliadis has yet to decide what to do with the future is ServiceTitan, a $6.3 billion publicly traded company that operates in the exact same space as Probook.
ServiceTitan has its own AI scheduling product, and Fortune currently lists Probook as a ServiceTitan partner. This means that the two companies are working together and not necessarily competing.
But Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital leaders have confidence in Mr. Eliadis. Because he has worked in the industry before and also has the mindset of a Silicon Valley founder.
“Most founders who build for the industry have never worked in the industry. George has,” Buehler told Fortune.
