Broccoli AI, built after founders knocked on 140 doors, says 1,500 businesses now use it

Broccoli AI, a San Francisco maker of AI agents for home-service businesses that its founders started in 2024, has raised $52 million across a $22 million Series A and a $30 million Series B, both led by Khosla Ventures, Fortune reported on October 28. The company thanked its customers in a letter from its founders the same day.

How it started

AJ Jain and Aditya Ketkar, the company's co-founders, wrote in the letter that they set out to build something new in early 2024, after three years building infrastructure for electric vehicles. Fortune reported that the two met at BITS Pilani in India in 2016 and have started companies together since 2017, among them a delivery app for closed college campuses, an interview-prep boot camp and, after Y Combinator, a universal API for electric vehicles. Jain told Fortune they signed eight customers in two years in London and "couldn't scale that business."

In San Francisco, the founders wrote, they tried idea after idea for two months and none stuck, "because none of them started with a real person and a real problem." They then knocked on 140 doors of plumbers, electricians and HVAC shops across the Bay Area. Fortune reported that they brought one product to show: an automated appointment-reminder call for a San Francisco electrician.

On June 11, 2024, they met Marcelle Flowers, CEO of Armstrong Plumbing in Sacramento. For three months the founders worked from her office every day, they wrote, and "in under three weeks, we had a product answering real calls for a real business." Fortune reported that Flowers became their first customer, then an adviser, then chief operating officer.

How it grew

Flowers' word of mouth took Broccoli from one customer to 10, Fortune reported, and the door-knocking stopped. Any Hour became the first enterprise customer, according to the founders' letter. Flowers told Fortune she had been paying $5,000 a month for an answering service that booked jobs into her software 33% of the time, and asked whether the founders could handle inbound calls. "We had that in 10 days," she said.

Fortune reported that the company had earlier raised a $1.5 million seed round after Y Combinator, and that the Series A, $22 million, had not previously been announced. Jain told Fortune the two rounds came nine months apart. Y Combinator and Operator Partners also took part.

Fortune said the company reports that more than 1,500 businesses now use Broccoli, including Ace Hardware Home Services, Mr. Electric and Any Hour Group. Jain said revenue has tripled since the Series A and headcount has grown from 15 people twelve months ago to more than 150, Fortune reported. In the past seven months the company has added roofing, pool care, garage doors, home improvement and exteriors.

The agents answer inbound calls, book jobs into the scheduling software a contractor already uses, follow up on open estimates and renew service memberships, Fortune reported. The company says its AI does work equivalent to roughly 30% of a typical contractor's office staff.

What the founders say

On how the product was built, the founders wrote in the letter: "Every Broccoli product and feature started as a request from one of you."

On jobs, "It's not taking away jobs," Jain told Fortune. "It's making jobs." He also acknowledged limits: the AI is "maybe good at like 80% of the tasks," he said, and the other 20% needs human judgment. Emergencies such as a flooding basement or a fire go to people in the contractor's office, Fortune reported.

What's next

The company said the new money will go toward hiring engineers and salespeople and speeding up product development, Fortune reported. By Jain's telling, according to Fortune, Broccoli has built maybe 1% of what it plans to, and at least 30% of its engineers still work on-site with customers.