Business
12h ago EN
BITS Pilani alumni-founded Broccoli AI raises $52 million from Vinod Khosla's Khosla Ventures
Broccoli AI, a San Francisco-based startup founded by BITS Pilani alumni AJ Jain and Aditya Ketkar that builds AI agents for plumbers, electricians and other home-service businesses, has raised $52 million across its Series A and Series B funding rounds. Khosla Ventures led both rounds, with participation from Y Combinator and Operator Partners. The two rounds were completed nine months apart. Prior to this, the startup had raised $1.5 million in seed funding after going through Y Combinator. It will now use the funding to accelerate hiring and expand its AI capabilities across the customer journey. “We are short on plumbers, electricians and HVAC technicians, and the ones we have spend their nights on paperwork. Software should have solved that long ago. With Broccoli, AI does the office work, and skilled trades workers get back to work only they can do,” said Samir Kaul, founding general partner at Khosla Ventures. What Broccoli does Broccoli's AI agents answer customer calls, book appointments, follow up on estimates, renew service memberships and re-engage past customers for home-service contractors. The startup serves businesses across sectors such as HVAC, roofing, solar, plumbing, pest control, electrical work, garage door repair and residential cleaning. Its platform also integrates with software already used by contractors, including ServiceTitan, Salesforce and Housecall Pro. Broccoli claims that over 1,500 home-service businesses use its platform and that its agents have handled more than 10 million customer conversations and booked 2.5 million service and sales appointments. The startup has also expanded into roofing, pool care, garage doors and exterior home improvement. Broccoli said its AI does work equivalent to roughly 30% of a typical contractor's office staff. Jain told Fortune that the system handles about 80% of tasks well, while the rest still needs human judgement. Emergency calls, such as a flooded basement or a fire, can be passed to people at the contractor's office. According to Jain, revenue has tripled since the Series A. Headcount has grown from 15 people a year ago to more than 150. “It's not taking away jobs,” Jain said. “It's making jobs.” From BITS Pilani to San Francisco Founded by Jain and Ketkar, Broccoli brings together two computer science graduates who met at BITS Pilani in 2016 and have been building companies together since 2017. Jain began his career at Adobe, while Ketkar, who serves as Broccoli's CTO, previously worked as a software engineer at Microsoft and as a researcher at the Computer Vision Center at UAB Barcelona. Their earlier ventures included a delivery app for closed college campuses, an interview preparation boot camp and Telematica, a Y Combinator-backed startup building a universal API for electric vehicles, which took them to London. After those businesses failed to scale, the pair arrived in San Francisco in January 2024. Instead of building another product straight away, they spent the spring of 2024 visiting around 140 contractors' offices across Northern California to understand their everyday problems. “People were not treating us like salesmen," Jain told the publication. “Curious kids was, like, our persona.”
