Meet the Baby Boomer whose life changed when 2 Gen Z AI founders walked into her plumbing business. She became their first COO

Marcelle Flowers thought two young strangers at her plumbing counter were there to sell something for a kids’ team. She was ready to brush them off in five minutes. Instead, the visit in June 2024 turned into the start of a working relationship that pulled her from a Sacramento shop into an AI startup in San Francisco.

The founders were AJ Jain and Aditya Ketkar, both in their mid-20s, and they had spent months driving around Northern California with a diary, not a pitch deck, stopping at about 140 contractor shops. By then they had only one product to show: an automated reminder call for a San Francisco electrician. Two years later, their company, Broccoli AI, says it has raised $52 million across a $22 million Series A and a $30 million Series B, both led by Khosla Ventures, with Y Combinator and Operator Partners also taking part. Broccoli is valued at $300 million post-money, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Broccoli sells AI agents to plumbing, HVAC and electrical businesses. The software answers inbound calls, books jobs into the contractor’s existing scheduling system, follows up on estimates and renews memberships. The company says more than 1,500 businesses use it, including Ace Hardware Home Services, Mr. Electric and Any Hour Group. In the past seven months, it has also moved into roofing, pool care, garage doors, home improvement and exteriors. Jain said revenue has tripled since the Series A, while headcount has gone from 15 people 12 months ago to more than 150.

Flowers was skeptical of AI at first. She worried it would take jobs, and she had just lost the employee who handled appointment reminders. But once the founders played her the product, she saw a fix for a very immediate problem. They loaded her scripts into the system within two days, then built inbound-call handling in about 10 days, all while working out of her shop for roughly three months and learning how a contracting business actually runs.

That is how a former plumbing-business owner became Broccoli’s first customer, then adviser, then COO. Flowers also helped shape the company’s logo, brand colors and first trade-show booth. Jain says the system is still only about 80% of the way there on any given task, with emergencies still routed to humans. The pitch is not that AI replaces the office. It is that it keeps the office from falling apart after 5 p.m.