Broccoli AI Raises $52 Million, Valued Near $300 Million

Broccoli AI has raised $52 million across a $22 million Series A and a $30 million Series B, both led by Khosla Ventures, with Y Combinator and Operator Partners participating. The company is valued at $300 million post-money, according to a person familiar with the matter; Broccoli declined to comment on its valuation. Co-founder and CEO AJ Jain, 27, told Fortune the rounds closed nine months apart, and the Series A had not previously been announced. The company earlier raised a $1.5 million seed round after going through Y Combinator.

The startup sells AI agents to plumbing, HVAC and electrical contractors. The software answers inbound calls, books jobs into the contractor's existing scheduling software, follows up on open estimates and renews service memberships. More than 1,500 businesses now use it, including Ace Hardware Home Services, Mr. Electric and Any Hour Group. In the past seven months, Broccoli has added roofing, pool care, garage doors, home improvement and exteriors.

Revenue has tripled since the Series A, Jain said. Headcount has grown from 15 people a year ago to more than 150. The new money will fund engineers, salespeople and faster product development. The company says its AI handles work equivalent to roughly 30% of a typical contractor's office staff.

How did two 20-somethings crack the trades?

Jain and co-founder Aditya Ketkar met at BITS Pilani in India in 2016 and have started companies together since 2017: a delivery app for closed college campuses, an interview-prep bootcamp and, after Y Combinator, a universal API for electric vehicles that took them to London. They signed eight customers there in two years. "We couldn't scale that business, even after raising a seed round from YC," Jain said.

They landed in San Francisco in January 2024. That May and June they walked into about 140 contractors' shops across the Bay Area, Stockton, Lodi, Modesto and Sacramento — carrying a diary instead of laptops and offering no sales pitch. "People were not treating us like salesmen," Jain said. "Curious kids was, like, our persona." They had built exactly one thing worth showing: an automated appointment-reminder call for a San Francisco electrician.

Who answered the door?

In June 2024, Marcelle Flowers' staff told her two students were waiting at the counter of Armstrong Plumbing, her Sacramento shop. "I literally said, you have five minutes," recalled Flowers, now 62. She was "really opposed to AI" and feared it would "take all the jobs." A deal to sell her business had fallen through months earlier, and Armstrong Plumbing was the only cold call the founders made twice.

They played her a recording of their reminder bot. Flowers had just lost the employee who made those calls and hadn't replaced her. "That hooks me," she said. Within two days, Jain and Ketkar loaded the bot with her scripts. Her bigger pain was the answering service: she was paying $5,000 a month for one that booked jobs into her software 33% of the time. She asked whether they could handle inbound calls too. "We had that in 10 days," she said.

For about three months, the founders wrote code from Flowers' shop while she explained the trade. "They didn't speak trade," she said. "They knew nothing about a plunger and a toilet." She became their first customer, then an adviser, then COO. Her word of mouth took Broccoli from one customer to 10, and the door-knocking stopped. "She's the soul of the company," Jain said. Flowers, who grew Armstrong's residential business from about $1 million to $8 million in seven years with no outside capital, got an apartment in San Francisco. "If you had told me that I'd be running an AI company in the heart of San Francisco I would have laughed you out of the room," she said.

Is the AI taking jobs?

Jain says no. A call-center representative at a Utah customer threatened to quit if the owners took Broccoli away. "It's not taking away jobs," Jain said. "It's making jobs." He concedes the AI is "maybe good at like 80% of the tasks"; emergencies like a flooding basement go to humans. Jain calls Broccoli a "business in a box" that could let a young technician in Columbus, Ohio start a company without hiring a receptionist first. He says the company has built maybe 1% of what it plans to, and its San Francisco office shares a parking lot with Cognition — competing with AI labs "not just for talent, even for real estate."