--- title: "What Is Broccoli AI? The YC Home Services Startup at $60M ARR" url: "https://goremy.ai/blog/articles/broccoli-ai-home-services-front-office-yc" author: Luis Chavez-Mattos editor: Luis Chavez-Mattos editor_title: Director, Product published: "2026-10-30T22:40:05.970Z" updated: "2026-10-30T22:40:05.970Z" topic: AI Industry & Strategy description: Broccoli uses AI voice, text and SMS to run the front office for home-service contractors. Here is what it does and how its YC founders found the idea. --- # What Is Broccoli AI? The YC Home Services Startup at $60M ARR > Broccoli uses AI voice, text and SMS to run the front office for home-service contractors. Here is what it does and how its YC founders found the idea. Edited by Luis Chavez-Mattos, Director, Product ยท Published 2026-10-30 ## What is Broccoli? Broccoli is a Y Combinator-backed startup that automates the front office of home-service businesses such as plumbers and other contractors. Its AI answers customer calls, follows up on leads, and schedules appointments across voice, text, and SMS. The founders say it serves over 500 customers, that AI-booked jobs are running at more than $1 billion a year for those customers, and that the company will finish the year above $60 million in ARR. ## TL;DR - Broccoli replaces the manual front-office work of **answering calls, chasing leads, and booking appointments** with AI across voice, text, and SMS. - The founders report **500+ customers** and an AI-booked-jobs run rate above $1 billion for those customers. That is revenue the customers book, not Broccoli's own revenue. - They expect to end the year at **over $60 million ARR**, after roughly zero revenue two years earlier. - The company came out of a failed first startup, **Telmatica**, an API product for electric vehicles that never found real usage. - The pivot was driven by two rules from that failure: pick a **big market from day one** and solve the customer's **most painful problem**. - Customer discovery only worked once the founders **stopped pitching** and started asking contractors about their family businesses. ## What does Broccoli actually do for a contractor? Home-service shops live on inbound demand. A phone rings, a lead fills out a form, a customer texts. Someone has to respond, qualify the job, and put it on a calendar. Broccoli's pitch is that the AI handles that whole chain. Per the founders, the product covers three jobs: 1. Answering customer calls. 2. Following up on leads. 3. Scheduling appointments. It does this over voice, text, and SMS, so a lead that comes in by phone and a lead that comes in by message go through the same system. The headline metric the company tracks is booked jobs. The founders said the run rate of jobs booked by the AI for their customers had passed $1 billion, a figure they had only just calculated. ## How did the founders get here? The two founders met at BITS Pilani in India, where their dorm rooms were next to each other. They started building together in their second year of college, around 2017. A summary of the path they described: | Stage | What they built | Outcome | |---|---|---| | College | A local delivery app on campus | Banned. They could not take payments and parts of it were deemed illegal. | | COVID era | An edtech product, run for a few years | Hard to scale, so they shut it down. | | After a 3-month break | Telmatica, APIs for electric vehicles | Got into YC, then wound down. | | 2024 | Broccoli, AI for contractors' front offices | Over 500 customers. | They applied to YC three times with different ideas before getting in with Telmatica. After the edtech shutdown they set a rule for themselves: pick an idea, work on it for three months, and move on if it does not work. They applied to YC within the first 25 days of the Telmatica idea. ## Why did Telmatica fail? Telmatica offered APIs that let companies connect to cars like Teslas and BMWs. Interest from European energy companies pulled the founders away from India. After Demo Day and a seed round, they spent two months in Norway and met more than 20 companies. They later moved to London after closing the Bangalore operation, which they described as living in an Airbnb. The main use case was demand response. If wind and solar output is low on a given night, a utility could pause EV charging for a thousand vehicles in a district. Consumers would be compensated for shifting their usage. The idea sounded good, but the economics did not hold. The founders said a consumer might save around $50 a year, while the downside was a car that is not charged before work. Utilities could not get consumers to join their programs, so the founders never saw meaningful API usage. The lesson they took away: investor capital is there to help you learn the market, not to force a weak idea to work. They also said the pivot period was stressful. One early angel investor suggested they return the capital and get jobs, and they took two days off to question whether they were the right people to build a business. ## How did they choose home services? During the pivot they looked at the customers they already served. There were three types: energy utilities, electrical contractors, and fleet operators. They chose contractors, partly out of personal preference. One founder said he liked selling to owners and contractors more than to a product manager at a very large company. They set two criteria for the next idea, both taken from Telmatica: - **A massive market from day one.** Not one that might grow into size later. - **The customer's most painful problem.** Not the third or fourth most painful one. For market size, they pointed to ServiceTitan, a leading CRM in the space that they said does over a billion dollars in revenue and recently went public. That settled the first criterion. The second one, the painful problem, required talking to contractors. ## How did door-to-door customer discovery work? In May 2024, at a YC office hour, the founders said they were reaching out to contractors on LinkedIn. The advice they got back was blunt: contractors do not hang out on LinkedIn, so go door to door and talk to every contractor in the Bay Area within two weeks. The first two weeks produced zero conversations. Sitting in a parking lot in Oakland, the founders realized they were behaving like salespeople. They opened with "we're startup founders from San Francisco building AI for you." One plumber told them to leave. Another shut the door on them. The founders noted that contractors get pitched constantly, and that in a family-run trade, "AI" was not a welcome word at the time. They changed the approach: 1. Left their bags and laptops in the car. 2. Walked into the next plumbing shop and shook the owner's hand. 3. Introduced themselves as students who wanted to learn about family-owned plumbing businesses. 4. Asked if the owner had a minute to talk. It worked. Owners talked about how their fathers started the business and how they got through the pandemic. The founders went from none to about eight conversations a day, kept it up for two months, and spoke with 140 contractors across the Bay Area. The source material cuts off before they describe what they concluded from those interviews, so this article does not cover the specific problem they identified. ## How fast has Broccoli grown? By the founders' account, the company had no revenue two years ago and expects to end this year above $60 million ARR. That would be a steep curve for any company, and it is worth noting these are self-reported numbers from a first public conversation, not audited figures. The $1 billion figure is also easy to misread. It describes the value of jobs the AI booked for customers, not what Broccoli earns. ## What can builders take from this? - **Test whether your problem is a top-three priority for the buyer.** The founders' main Telmatica lesson was that a problem important to you may rank fifth for your customer. - **Match your discovery method to the audience.** LinkedIn outreach failed with tradespeople. In-person visits worked once the framing changed. - **Lead with curiosity, not product.** The shift from "we're building AI for you" to "we're students learning about your business" turned zero conversations into eight a day. - **Use the customers you already have.** The pivot came from existing contacts, not a blank slate. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is Broccoli AI? Broccoli is a startup that automates the front office for home-service businesses. Its AI answers calls, follows up on leads, and schedules appointments over voice, text, and SMS. The founders say it has over 500 customers. ### What was Telmatica? Telmatica was the founders' earlier YC company. It offered APIs for connecting to electric vehicles, with a main use case of pausing EV charging when renewable energy supply was low. It failed to gain traction because consumers had little incentive to join the utility programs built on top of it. ### How did the founders find their first customers' needs? They did in-person customer discovery with contractors in the Bay Area. After a failed first two weeks of pitching, they reframed themselves as students learning about family businesses. They ended up speaking with 140 contractors over about two months. ### Does the $1 billion figure mean Broccoli makes $1 billion? No. The founders described it as the run rate of jobs booked by the AI for their customers. Broccoli's own revenue is the ARR figure, which they expect to exceed $60 million by year end. ### Is the $60 million ARR confirmed? It is a forward-looking statement from the founders in an interview, not an audited number. The same goes for the customer count and booked-jobs figure.