Broccoli AI, a San Francisco-based startup founded by BITS Pilani alumni AJ Jain and Aditya (Adi) Ketkar, has raised $52 million across its Series A and Series B rounds to scale AI agents that run the front office of plumbing, HVAC, electrical and other home-service businesses. Khosla Ventures led both rounds, with Y Combinator and Operator Partners participating, the company announced on 28 October.

Jain, who is co-founder and CEO, told Fortune the money came in two tranches nine months apart: a previously unannounced $22 million Series A and a $30 million Series B. Fortune also reported a post-money valuation of about $300 million, citing a person familiar with the matter; Broccoli declined to comment on valuation. The company had earlier raised $1.5 million in seed funding after going through Y Combinator.

What Broccoli’s AI agents do

Broccoli sells voice and messaging agents that sit between a contractor and its customers. According to the company, the agents:

• answer inbound calls and book jobs straight into the scheduling software a contractor already uses, with integrations including ServiceTitan, Salesforce and Housecall Pro;
• follow up on open estimates and renew service memberships;
• collect details about the home, its equipment and its service history before a technician arrives; and
• reconnect with past customers when the schedule has spare capacity.

More than 1,500 home-service businesses use the platform, including Ace Hardware Home Services, Any Hour Group, Mr. Electric and Authority Brands. Broccoli says its agents have handled more than 10 million customer conversations and booked 2.5 million service and sales appointments. For one unnamed national, multi-location customer, it reports a 29% rise in revenue and a 36% cut in overhead in the first year. Over the past seven months it has expanded beyond its core trades into roofing, pool care, garage doors, home improvement and exteriors.

Built by walking into 140 workshops

Jain and Ketkar met as computer science students at BITS Pilani in 2016 and have been building companies together since 2017, from a delivery app for closed college campuses to an interview-preparation boot camp and Telematica, a Y Combinator-backed universal API for electric vehicles that took them to London. When that business failed to scale, the pair moved to San Francisco in January 2024.

Instead of writing code first, they spent the spring of 2024 visiting around 140 contractors’ offices across Northern California to understand what actually slowed those businesses down. Their first customer, Armstrong Plumbing, was run by home-services operator Marcelle Flowers, who later joined Broccoli as chief industry officer. “They didn’t start with AI. They started by sitting with us, learning our business, and solving what actually mattered,” Flowers has said of the founders.

Growth and the human handoff

Jain told Fortune that revenue has tripled since the Series A and that headcount has grown from about 15 people a year ago to more than 150. The company, which also has offices in Utah, says the new capital will go into hiring engineers and salespeople and extending its AI across the full customer journey.

Jain has said the system can handle roughly 80% of front-office tasks, with the rest needing human judgement; emergencies such as a flooded basement or a fire are routed to staff at the contractor’s office. He argues the technology helps small businesses respond consistently, especially after hours, rather than replacing their teams.

Why it matters for India’s AI story

Broccoli is the latest example of Indian-origin founders building vertical AI agent companies for global markets, and of investors backing narrow, workflow-specific agents that plug into existing software rather than general-purpose assistants. Its approach, deep field research before product, tight integration with systems of record and a clear human escalation path, offers a template for Indian enterprises and startups deploying voice AI in sectors such as field services, utilities, healthcare scheduling and retail, where missed calls translate directly into lost revenue.

For CIOs, the numbers Broccoli cites point to where agentic AI is earning its keep first: high-volume, repetitive customer interactions with measurable outcomes such as booked jobs and renewals. The open questions remain the ones every deployment faces, including accuracy on edge cases, data handling across integrated platforms, and how quickly a human can take over when the agent should not.

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