The Idea: Tyson Chen and Apurva Shrivastava met at an MIT poker night in 2022 and bonded over the same observation: every brick-and-mortar business they knew was bleeding revenue from missed phone calls. Their first instinct was restaurants. They built an AI voice agent that could pick up the phone, take orders, and book tables, and started shopping it around at restaurant industry events. At a conference in Texas in 2023, they got cornered by a Dallas heating and cooling company called Rescue Air who told them, in not so many words, that they had the right product but the wrong customer. A missed restaurant call costs you a $40 takeout order. A missed HVAC call costs you a $40,000 install. The two MIT engineers spent that afternoon walking the Rescue Air offices, killed the restaurant pivot in their heads, and three months later shipped a custom version for the Dallas company. This was the beginning of Avoca.

The Execution:

• 2022: Chen and Shrivastava meet at an MIT poker night. Both are engineers. Both are obsessed with voice models. They start tinkering on a side project to handle missed phone calls for restaurants.
• 2023: A chance afternoon with Rescue Air at a Texas restaurant conference reframes the entire company. They kill the restaurant idea, spend three months building a custom version for HVAC, and use Rescue Air as the design partner.
• 2024: Y Combinator leads the seed round. Avoca lands its first 10 customers entirely through trade shows, conferences, and warm intros from Rescue Air. No paid marketing. No content engine. Just rooms full of HVAC owners who were sick of losing 30% of their inbound calls.
• 2025: Kleiner Perkins leads the Series A with partner Leigh Marie Braswell, a former early Scale AI employee, taking the deal. The product expands beyond inbound calls into scheduling, estimate follow-ups, and dispatch.
• 2026: Meritech and General Catalyst co-lead a Series B, bringing total funding to $125M+ at a $1B valuation. Avoca now serves more than 800 HVAC, plumbing, roofing, and electrical businesses across the US.
• The kicker: The company is named after the Avoca river in Ireland, where two rivers meet to form one. Two engineers. Two skills. One unicorn.

The lesson? Your first customer is rarely your real customer. Chen and Shrivastava had a working product, a clear value prop, and a market in mind, and they were still wrong about who would pay for it. The only way they figured that out was by getting in a room with operators and listening to what hurt. If you find yourself stuck pre-traction, stop polishing the deck and go find your Rescue Air.