Welcome, Topline Pro: Building the Tech Stack for the Long Underserved Home Services Industry

We’re announcing today that we’re leading the $12M series A for Topline Pro, which is building the first comprehensive tech stack for the $500B+ home services industry. Topline Pro enables the millions of entrepreneurs in home services to have more ownership and control over their business by dramatically improving how they’re discovered, build trust and customer relationships, and efficiently scale their bookings. Ultimately, Topline Pro is about fostering economic growth for a sector that has had to rely on dated, exploitative systems and generally been left out of the tech-enabled advancements that have transformed the scalability in other sectors.

The impact of Topline Pro is often best conveyed directly through its customers, who see transformative business value from moving their business to the Topline Pro platform, which has generated over $180M in revenue for its customers since launching in winter 2022. There’s Jered, a landscaper in Daytona Beach, Florida who grew from $70K in revenue to over $2.2M in just over a year by using Topline Pro. And there’s Lauren, a home painter in Adrian, Michigan who started a business and grew it to nearly $1M in revenue in just 12 months. These entrepreneurs are skilled tradespeople at their unique craft and have long deserved a platform to properly capture their market value and potential.

That gets at another point: this market has been dramatically underserved due to a mix of structural and cultural issues. For decades, conventional wisdom in venture capital was to stay far, far away from the SMB sector — it’s notoriously fragmented and there can be especially high churn. Home services have been particularly neglected, both for these reasons and the assumptions that traditionally more “blue-collar” trades imply a less-sophisticated operator who isn’t tech savvy enough to employ the latest and greatest tech. As a result, home services SMB have had to rely on costly middlemen, both agencies and lead-generation platforms, where misaligned incentives impede growth and efficiency. As a consumer, many of us have experienced the flipside of this first hand: a deluge of contractors reaching out (and even repeatedly following up) after a request is submitted through an aggregator or marketplace.

This is in stark contrast to the tailwinds of change we’ve seen in adjacent SMB industries: there’s Toast, which simplified POS for restaurants before expanding to a customer-facing ordering experience and growing to a $30B valuation, as well as Shopify, which has reshaped commerce opportunities for retail business across the globe. Both these platforms enable small businesses to operate with much more flexibility, efficiency and scale, so they can focus more on what they uniquely do best — be it cooking amazing food, or selling unique goods. There has been no analogous platform in home services, despite it being a massive, incredibly resilient category: it’s recession proof and incapable of being automated by AI (roofs will leak whether or not there’s a market downturn, and a pro will always have to fix it).

In home services, the entrepreneurs spend the majority of their time out on jobs that are manual by nature, so historically, the operational overhead is done outside primary work hours and duties. That creates a pronounced need for an efficient, comprehensive platform that can collapse legwork and automate growth. AI uniquely makes this possible, generating growth assets (ads, copy, reviews capabilities) while managing operational flows, and distributing the best practices to all pros across its platform. The long-term vision for Topline is to empower the business owner to make key decisions around management, but enable Topline to execute these decisions, so they accelerate growth while having more time and resources to focus on their craft or spend much-deserved time with friends and family.

Nick Ornitz & Shannon Kay, Topline Pro’s Co-founders, are  uniquely suited to build this. They have long-standing expertise in the home services space, as well as a deep personal connection to small business owners — from family members who operate their own services companies to daily conversations with customers.

Tech innovation can often feel saturated, especially in b2b SaaS, but we still find that there are millions of people and small businesses right before our eyes that deserve dramatically better tools and resources. With Topline Pro, there’s a profound, billions-dollar opportunity to reshape economic empowerment for the small businesses that have been an indispensable part of peoples’ lives for centuries.