Two MIT grads met at poker night, built an AI startup now worth $1 billion

Apurva Shrivastava and Tyson Chen met during a poker night at MIT. Both had grown up watching family businesses lose customers to missed calls — Shrivastava’s parents ran a small business in Michigan, while Chen’s mother ran an acupuncture practice in Pennsylvania. In 2022, the pair co-founded Avoca to solve the problem they had both lived as children.

They initially built an AI answering service for restaurants, before Chen had a realisation. ‘When a restaurant misses a phone call, that’s a $30, $40 order,’ he told Fortune. ‘When a home service business misses a phone call, that could be a $30,000–$40,000 HVAC install they’re missing. So, instantly, we thought: wait, this is a completely different order of magnitude.’

In 2023, they built a product specifically for Rescue Air, a home service business, which helped them land their first customers. Avoca’s AI voice agents now serve plumbers, electricians, HVAC technicians and roofers, picking up calls instantly, sounding convincingly human, and integrating directly with a company’s calendar to book appointments and follow up on old unsigned quotes.

According to Fortune, Avoca has raised more than $125 million over the last couple of years, valuing the company at $1 billion.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/by Vronmikah2024