Latest news with #Netic
Forbes
16 hours ago
- Business
- Forbes
The Most Overlooked Opportunity In AI Isn't What You Think
HVAC AI: coming to a VC team near you. It's no secret that generative AI has been dominating the venture capital discourse. But while many investors continue to chase co-pilots for coders and GPT plug-ins for enterprise software, a quieter AI revolution is taking place in industries often overlooked by tech: plumbing, HVAC, and skilled trades. Netic, a San Francisco-based startup, recently raised $20 million from Greylock and Founders Fund to bring AI to the home services sector. Its platform automates client outreach, schedules technicians, and even predicts emergency service needs. This is not just a flash in the pan. McKinsey estiamtes that global invstment in construction and engineering technology doubled to $50 billion in the period between 2020 and 2022 vs. 2017 and 2019. Silicon Valley is often perceived to favor abstract problems over physical ones; more than half of venture dollars have flooded into AI infrastructure and enterprise productivity. Critical sectors like home servicesre main reliant on manual processes, word-of-mouth referrals, and outdated systems. These represent the next frontier in AI and fintech innovation. Pricing transparency is one are where AI can influence the construction industry. In this context, the emergence of 'HVAC AI" feels both timely and overdue. Despite their unglamorous nature, these sectors represent essential services. Demand is surging due to aging infrastructure, climate extremes, and a shrinking labor pool. But the software layer supporting these workers remains fragile at best. Much of the attention so far has focused on scheduling automation. But the challenges in home services extend far beyond the calendar. Homeowners frequently receive drastically different quotes for the same repair job with no clear standard for comparison. Plumbing estimates can range from $300 to $1,200, depending on who you call. This inconsistency erodes trust and drives inefficiency. Standardized pricing frameworks powered by AI could help address this. Using regional data and historical estimates, platforms could benchmark average costs, enabling providers to differentiate based on quality rather than opacity. This would not only improve the customer experience. Furthermore, it would reward contractors who operate transparently and efficiently. Project visibility is another critical gap. Delays are common in repair and renovation projects, but homeowners often do not find out until it is too late. Commercial builders have long used project management software to reduce rework and miscommunication; some report a 20% reduction in delays due to better coordination. A similar tool for residential projects could dramatically improve outcomes for consumers and contracots aliek. Imagine a world where real-time updates, timelines, and permit tracking are avialable in one click. This is the true power of 'HVAC AI.' Single women are a rising percentage of first-time home buyers. Homeowners often lose track of service intervals or warranty expiration dates. AI could streamline this process, acting as a digital maintenance assistant: logging repair history, tracking service schedules, and surfacing proactive alerts before things break. For providers, this creates opportunities to build long-term relationships rather than one-off transactions. Predictive modeling offers even more promise. Given a home's age, square footage, location, and renovation history, machine learning models could forecast when major systems might require maintenance or replacement. If a prospective home buyer, for instance, knows at the time of purchase that she will need replace a roof in 5 years, she can begin to plan financially. These insights would empower consumers to budget more effectively and make informed decisions at the point of purchase, not in moments of crisis. These gaps are not theoretical. They are felt most acutely by the growing segment of homeowners navigating maintenance without deep expertise or trusted referrals. Women now make up the majority of first-time homebuyers in the U.S., despite earning less than their male counterparts. Yet the service landscape remains opaque, inconsistent, and in many cases, dismissive. This represents both a market inefficiency and an equity issue. Tech solutions that address these problems holistically will not only modernize the industry, but also make it more iclusive, trusworthy, and efficient. Pricing transparency, proactive maintenance, and real-time updates are merely the tip of the spear. The venture community often talks about 'picks and shovels' investing, which refers to building foundational tools rather than flashy end-user apps. Yet some of the most powerful picks and shovels may be those helping legacy industries work smarter, not harder. In an era where AI is too often reduced to chatbots and copilots, the bigger opportunity might be in making sure someone shows up on time to fix your boiler—and knows exactly what it will cost. The next generation of AI breakthroughs may not look like another unicorn SaaS platform. They may look like the smart layer sitting on top of physical labor, infrastructure, and home services that have kept cities running for decades. Investors would be wise to pay attention.
Mint
02-06-2025
- Business
- Mint
AI is here for plumbers and electricians. Will it transform home services?
The next time you book a plumber, artificial intelligence might be taking your call or returning your message. Or, it might reach out because it knows your air conditioner needs an upgrade well before the summer. Netic, a startup based in San Francisco, is selling an AI-based platform that helps home-services firms automatically reach out to clients in need of maintenance or upgrades, and takes calls and messages on their behalf. Founded in 2024, Netic is part of a growing crop of startups looking beyond the saturated white-collar market and toward home-services operators like electricians, plumbers, roofers and HVAC—which stands for heating, ventilation and air conditioning—specialists. The startup Monday said it has raised $20 million with funding from venture-capital firms including Greylock and Founders Fund. While Netic's mission to automate sales and business operations seems simple, it can be a challenge to actually integrate AI into services businesses that run on manual labor—and it certainly can't replace the work of skilled human technicians. The rise of AI in skilled trades is getting a boost from private-equity firms, which have invested heavily in the area and are now injecting the technology into their portfolio companies—hoping for productivity gains and hefty returns. Netic's customers are mostly private-equity-owned home-services companies, as well as some larger owner-operated firms, the startup said. Asheem Chandna, an investor at venture-capital firm Greylock who served as lead investor in Netic's seed round, said home-services businesses often have 'underutilized capacity," or staff who aren't being put to work most efficiently. The point of AI, then, is to optimize the pairing of technicians with customers when they need help, and to reach them before they do, Chandna said. Netic's platform, which uses generative AI models and fine-tuned language models, is designed to use a certain AI model for each technology function, from customer verification to urgency and priority analysis, said Melisa Tokmak, the startup's founder and chief executive.. For instance, Netic's algorithms pick up on signals from customer calls, bumping a regular maintenance call to lower priority or escalating repairs for weather and emergencies. Or, a customer who has a quote from a rival firm might be pushed to the top. To help drive sales, Netic's AI creates marketing campaigns that predict when customers might need a maintenance call based on data like an impending storm, the region and property type. The platform also works with various customer management software for the trades, Tokmak said, and is meant to minimize the amount of integration between software that businesses have to deal with. One customer, Chris Hoffmann, CEO of St. Louis-based home-services company HB Solutions Group, said that many startups are automating the work of booking appointments over the phone through AI voice agents. Hoffmann gets so many pitches for AI products, he said, that he's often turning down vendors hawking their wares. But Netic's AI platform, along with taking calls and answering messages with more accuracy and recall than humans can, helps Hoffmann Brothers plan and prioritize which of the firm's hundreds of technicians should take appointments and when, he said. 'I have to match my capacity with my customer demand on a daily basis," Hoffman said. 'And that's really hard, because I don't always get to choose how many people's air conditioners are going to break when they call me." Still, even with the amount of AI that Hoffmann has put into his firm, only 20% of customer calls are being answered by Netic's AI platform. 'We're still human first," he added.
