On a Tuesday morning in June 2024, Marcelle Flowers grabbed her wallet when her staff told her two young guys were waiting at the counter of her Sacramento plumbing shop, Armstrong Plumbing. She assumed they were selling chocolate bars for a soccer team.
“I literally said, you have five minutes,” Flowers told Fortune.
That five-minute meeting — which stretched into four hours — kicked off one of the more unlikely founder stories you’ll read this year. Those two visitors were AJ Jain, 27, and Aditya Ketkar, two Indian engineers who had spent that spring knocking on roughly 140 contractor shops across Northern California with a paper diary instead of laptops, carrying exactly one product: an automated appointment-reminder call they’d built for a San Francisco electrician.
This week, their company, Broccoli AI, announced it has raised $52 million across a Series A and Series B — both rounds led by Khosla Ventures, with Y Combinator and Operator Partners participating. The raise was $22 million in Series A and $30 million in Series B, announced nine months apart. The company is valued at $300 million post-money. Marcelle Flowers is now Broccoli’s first COO, running the company from San Francisco.
The Real Story Here
This is not a typical VC startup story. Jain and Ketkar were not former Google engineers with warm intros to Sequoia. Their previous venture — a universal API for electric vehicles — had failed to scale after two years and a YC seed round in London. They arrived in San Francisco in January 2024 with no product-market fit and no clear industry.
Their thesis was simple but rare: go find an owner who cares about solving their customer’s problem — not a product manager at a 5,000-person company. So they went door to door. Stockton. Lodi. Modesto. Sacramento. One hundred and forty stops, two visits to Armstrong Plumbing (it was the only cold call they made twice).
The door-to-door approach is nearly extinct in tech. It worked precisely because it was extinct. “People were not treating us like salesmen,” Jain said. “Curious kids was our persona.”
When they met Flowers, they played her a recording of the reminder bot. Flowers had just lost the employee who made those calls for her shop. “That hooks me,” she said. Within 10 days, they built an inbound call-answering product at her request. For three months, the founders stopped writing code in San Francisco and did it from her shop in Sacramento while she taught them the trades. They didn’t speak trade, she said. “They knew nothing about a plunger and a toilet.”
By the Numbers
The traction is not soft:
- 1,500+ businesses now use Broccoli AI, including Ace Hardware Home Services, Mr. Electric, and Any Hour Group
- Revenue tripled since the Series A, per Jain’s disclosure to Fortune
- Headcount grew from 15 to 150+ in 12 months
- $52M raised total ($1.5M seed + $22M Series A + $30M Series B), all with Khosla Ventures leading the institutional rounds
- $300M post-money valuation
- Armstrong Plumbing, Flowers’ own business, grew from $1M to $8M in seven years with no outside capital — the operator DNA behind the product
For context on what this funding environment means for founders, HL covered why the $515.8 billion VC headline number hides a brutal Series A cliff — Broccoli navigated it by building revenue first and raising second.
Broccoli’s AI agents answer inbound calls, book jobs directly into the scheduling software contractors already use, follow up on open estimates, and renew service memberships. The company says the AI does work equivalent to roughly 30% of a typical contractor’s office staff. The home services market — plumbing, HVAC, electrical, roofing, pool care, garage doors — is massive, fragmented, and notoriously underserved by tech.
The Hustler’s Library Take
The lesson here isn’t “raise $52M.” The lesson is how Jain and Ketkar found the product. They didn’t run a survey. They didn’t build a landing page and run ads. They walked into 140 businesses with nothing to sell and listened. That is a playbook most founders skip because it’s slow and uncomfortable. It’s also why Broccoli has 1,500 customers and 3x revenue growth while a lot of better-funded startups are still searching for fit.
Flowers is the other half of this lesson. She built Armstrong Plumbing from $1 million to $8 million with no investors, survived two terminal cancer diagnoses and long COVID, and nearly sold the business before these two showed up. Her operational knowledge — the kind you only get from decades in the field — became the product’s foundation. That’s a form of customer insight that no sales deck can manufacture.
This also puts a sharp point on something HL has noted before: the founders who build something real before raising tend to raise on their terms. Jain and Ketkar had a working product and a paying customer before they pitched YC. The $300M valuation came after the proof, not before it.
For small business owners watching from the other side of this story — you are not just a customer to a startup like Broccoli. You are the product’s architect. The best founders are walking into your shop right now, trying to understand your pain. Knowing what problem you’d actually pay to solve is leverage.
What You Should Do
1. Run the “Broccoli audit” on your own operations. Flowers’ first ask wasn’t complicated: “Can you answer the phone after 5 PM and book jobs into my software?” Walk through your business and write down the three things that fall through the cracks when your team goes home. Those gaps are where the next $300M company will be built — and where AI can replace cost today.
2. Treat the founders who knock on your door differently. Jain and Ketkar made 140 stops. Most owners gave them nothing. Flowers gave them five minutes and changed both their lives. The next breakthrough product in your industry is probably being built by someone asking questions in your waiting room right now. Talk to them.
3. If you’re building a startup: do the door-to-door before the deck. Broccoli went from one automated reminder call to $52M raised by spending three months in a Sacramento plumbing shop instead of a San Francisco coworking space. The customer discovery came before the product. That sequence is the playbook. Most of that $515 billion in VC money went to founders who skipped this step.
Broccoli’s full story from Fortune is worth reading: Meet the Baby Boomer whose life changed when 2 Gen Z AI founders walked into her plumbing business. For broader context on AI-driven business formation trends, the SBA’s business formation guidance is worth bookmarking.
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