Indian origin engineer’s ‘missed call’ idea is now a $1 billion AI startup

Apurva Shrivastava and his work partner, Tyson Chen, looked at the concept of missed calls and utilised the latest in AI tech to help a business that was losing up $40,000 – all by missing a customer call. These engineers sat down and built an AI company that now serves businesses utilising AI agents, keeping basic infrastructure services running smoothly. No big claims to boast.

His startup now carries a valuation of $1 billion, backed by prestigious names like Kleiner Perkins, Meritech, General Catalyst, Amplify, and other top Silicon Valley investors.

But Shrivastava didn’t go the conventional way to address the services industry. For him, it began at a personal level. 

The journey from Michigan service calls to MIT Labs 

Shrivastava, who is a first-generation Indian-American, grew up with a front-row seat to the struggles of small-business ownership. In Michigan, he personally handled thousands of customer calls for businesses, and in the process, learned a brutal lesson early on – in the home services world, if you don’t answer the phone, you don’t get the job.

Shrivastava moved from Michigan to Cambridge to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). There, he didn’t just study Computer Science and Math – he became a deep-tech specialist, conducting AI research and serving as a teaching assistant for the university’s largest AI courses.

Career journey: The path to Avoca

In his early days, Shrivastava spent his years interning for tech titans like Apple and Google, before spending his time as an engineer at Retool and Sunshine. It was during these years that he began to bridge the gap between elite AI research and practical, blue-collar utility.

In 2022, Shrivastava joined his college friend Tyson Chen and co-founded Avoca. The duo joined the Y Combinator Winter 2023 batch with a simple but radical idea – an AI agent that sounds human, answers the phone in seconds, and handles everything from scheduling to CRM entries.

While the duo were initially building answering machines for restaurants, where Shrivastava says that a missed call could cost the business $30-$40 per order, their attention shifted to a firm specialising in HVAC systems, where a missed call could lead to a loss of $40,000. 

For the first few months, Chen and Shrivastava built a product especially for Rescue Air, the HVAC business. It was this business that helped them find the first few customers for their startup, building AI agents helping service-based businesses manage activities like customer calls, schedule follow-ups, estimate generation and even deal with dispatch. 

Unlike most AI startups, Avoca doesn’t serve the biggest names in the world. Instead, it takes care of simpler services like HVAC, plumbing, roofing, and electrical businesses. The duo did their best to advertise the business using networking and trade shows, moving up to 800 customers today.

So what exactly does Avoca do?

Avoca provides an AI workforce that acts as a 24/7 customer service representative. These AI agents don’t just record voicemails – they engage in complex, human-like conversations to run the business.

Avoca states that as a 24/7 AI voice responder, customers get a custom, human-sounding voice agent that answers every call within seconds. It can handle objections, answer FAQs, and even qualify leads.

Unlike basic bots, Avoca is deeply integrated with industry CRMs like ServiceTitan and Housecall Pro. It checks a company’s real-time schedule and books appointments directly into the calendar. The AI proactively calls or texts customers who have outstanding estimates or missed appointments, “filling the board” without human intervention. When a customer fills out a web form, Avoca’s AI calls them back instantly within seconds to secure the job before they call a competitor.

One of Shrivastava’s core contributions to the startup is the Avoca Coach – a platform that doesn’t just replace humans. The Coach lets AI listen to customer calls handled by real employees and provides them with real-time scoring and coaching insights to improving their sales techniques. This way, the system keeps human employees in the loop, improving their sales techniques and grow their businesses.

Avoca’s success: A billion-dollar milestone

The market’s response has been nothing short of explosive. On April 27, 2026, Avoca announced a Series B round co-led by Meritech and General Catalyst, with earlier backing from Kleiner Perkins. The startup is now valued at $1 billion, with a total funding of over $125 million.

“The reason we are winning is because we have the best product and a world-class team which includes multiple former YC founders and engineers from MIT, Stanford, Google, Meta, and many other top institutions,” says Shrivastava upon celebrating the latest funding round.

While Shrivastava’s exact personal net worth remains private, his co-founder equity in the $1 billion startup places his wealth comfortably in the hundreds of millions. And it’s all made possible by using AI in the right way.

“AI changes the math. For the first time, every contractor in America can have a concierge-grade revenue operation: every call answered, every customer followed up with, every marketing dollar tracked from ad click to dispatched job,” writes Shrivastava in a LinkedIn post.

He believes that while frontier AI labs have cracked into the app layer for data-heavy use cases like coding, it is the complex and workflow-driven industries where AI is yet to nab the win.