PC: LinkedIn
The company had earlier secured $1.5 million in seed funding after participating in Y Combinator. The latest funding placed Broccoli’s post-money valuation at $300 million, according to a person familiar with the matter cited by Fortune. The workforce had also expanded considerably, growing from 15 employees a year earlier to more than 150.
The Series A funding had not previously been announced.
Jain said revenue had tripled since the Series A round. The company declined to comment on that valuation. You use AI every day. Now get your AI Quotient. Take the AIQ test.
Reportedly, she was paying about $5,000 a month for the service, which entered bookings into her company’s scheduling software only around a third of the time, according to her account. They returned with a working version in about 10 days. Word of mouth took Broccoli AI from its first customer to 10, allowing the founders to reduce their reliance on cold calls. She became pregnant at 19 and raised her son as a single mother. Finding her faith at 26 marked a change in direction, she told Fortune. She joined her father’s company in 1995. In 2011, she established its residential service-and-repair operation, which she said grew from approximately $1 million in annual business to $8 million over seven years without outside investment, as reported by Fortune. The business suffered during the COVID-19 period. It was June 2024, and a deal to sell her business, Armstrong Plumbing, had fallen through months earlier. The company says its technology can perform work equivalent to roughly 30% of a typical contractor’s office staff. More than 1,500 businesses were using the product at the time of Fortune’s report, including Ace Hardware Home Services, Mr. The company raised $22 million in a Series A round and a further $30 million in Series B funding nine months later, bringing the two rounds to $52 million.
Flowers said she experienced long COVID for about nine months, while the company’s performance deteriorated. “I literally said, you have five minutes,” recalled Flowers, now 62 years old. She wanted to know whether the founders could develop a system that handled incoming calls as well. For roughly three months, the founders worked from Flowers’ Sacramento premises instead of spending all their time at their San Francisco office. She walked them through the daily demands of a contracting business, explaining the language, processes and customer expectations they had not encountered in their engineering careers. Flowers became an adviser before taking on the role of chief operating officer. She also helped shape the company’s public identity, working on its logo, colour scheme and first trade-show booth. Her contribution extended beyond business advice: she had become involved in the company’s development at a point when the founders were still deciding what the product should do. Flowers later moved into an apartment in San Francisco to work with the startup. Flowers grew up in Anaheim, California, in a family closely connected to construction. Her father was a commercial plumber whose projects included restaurants, hotels and schools. She has described the years from her mid-teens to her mid-twenties as a period when she made decisions she later regretted. She was also “really opposed to AI. She feared it would take her people and “take all the jobs. Broccoli AI develops voice-based agents for businesses that provide plumbing, heating, ventilation, air conditioning and electrical services. The software can answer incoming calls, schedule jobs through existing systems, contact customers about outstanding estimates and manage service-membership renewals. These tasks may appear routine, but they can create substantial pressure for small companies. Calls continue to arrive after office staff have left for the day, technicians need to follow up on estimates, and owners must keep track of appointments while managing the work itself. Electric and Any Hour Group. Broccoli AI’s growth has attracted significant investor backing. Khosla Ventures led both, with Y Combinator and Operator Partners also participating.
She had also previously battled cancer twice, describing both diagnoses as terminal.
At 62, Marcelle Flowers had spent decades building her career in the plumbing industry when two young entrepreneurs arrived at her Sacramento business with an idea for using artificial intelligence. Flowers became the company’s first chief operating officer, bringing practical industry experience to a business that has since raised $52 million in venture funding and expanded to more than 1,500 customers, as reported by Fortune. The pair met at BITS Pilani in India in 2016 and started working on businesses together the following year, according to Fortune reports. The founders moved to San Francisco in January 2024, looking for a different direction. They eventually called on roughly 140 businesses. At 62, she had little enthusiasm for the idea of introducing AI into a business built around human relationships.
Because it addressed a problem she already had, the demonstration caught her attention.
Flowers was initially sceptical when her employees told her that two young men were waiting at the counter. Initially sceptical of the technology, Flowers agreed to test their automated appointment reminder system after recognising a problem it could solve. The meeting soon developed into a working partnership that helped shape Broccoli AI, a startup founded by engineers Jain and Ketkar. Jain and Ketkar had already spent several years trying to establish themselves as entrepreneurs before they began visiting plumbing, heating and electrical contractors in Northern California. After joining Y Combinator, they developed an application programming interface for electric vehicles and moved to London to pursue the idea. They secured eight customers over two years, but the business struggled to grow despite receiving seed funding. That spring, they began visiting contractors in person, travelling through the Bay Area and into Stockton, Lodi, Modesto and Sacramento. The founders wanted to understand how smaller trade businesses operated, rather than designing a product from the perspective of a large corporation. They were also looking for an experienced operator who could help them turn what they heard into something useful. She assumed they might be selling fundraising chocolates and was prepared to give them only a few minutes of her time. The founders, meanwhile, had arrived with a simple automated telephone call designed to remind customers about upcoming appointments. The employee responsible for making those reminder calls had left Armstrong Plumbing, and Flowers had not found a replacement. She agreed to try the product. Within two days, Jain and Ketkar had adapted it using the scripts she supplied. The trial soon moved beyond appointment reminders, however, when Flowers explained that her answering service was a much bigger expense.
Their earlier ventures included a delivery service for university campuses and an interview preparation programme.