Partnering with Probook: AI for the Trades
Sequoia by Konstantine Buhler ● Covered by 2 sources
Probook is building AI for home-service dispatch and customer calls. Sequoia says it can cut the admin mess that slows down plumbers, HVAC techs and electricians.
Based on reporting by Sequoia, by Konstantine Buhler — read the original for the full story.
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Probook is betting that the boring part of home services is the part worth fixing first. The startup, backed by Sequoia from seed through Series A, is building what it calls an AI operating system for the trades, with dispatch at the center.
The company’s origin story is personal. George Eliadis grew up helping his father, John, a New York City police officer who moved into power washing after an injury ended his time on the force. What started as weekend and summer help turned into a front-row view of how much time small service businesses lose to scheduling, follow-ups and other overhead.
George later saw the same pain inside TR Miller, a home services company in Illinois and Probook’s first customer. That experience convinced the founders that the problem was bigger than one family business. Electricians, HVAC technicians, plumbers and other tradespeople are all stuck with the same drag: too much admin, too many disconnected tools, and too little time spent actually doing the work that keeps the business alive.
Probook’s pitch is that AI should handle the messy middle. The system is meant to take in a request, route it to the right technician, and keep the customer updated with an ETA, while using context like experience, availability, distance, close rates and ticket sizes. The promise is simple enough to understand and hard enough to execute: faster help for customers, leaner operations for companies, and less stress for the people in the field.
Sequoia is also leaning heavily on the founders themselves. George kept selling things on the side while growing up. Ben Cervantez, his co-founder, studied with him at Penn’s M&T program, interned at McKinsey and then dropped out to join Probook. Lewis Zhang started coding at 7, finished Berkeley degrees in electrical engineering and computer science in two years, and worked on player-server matching at Roblox. The firm says the team is already flying around the country in person to onboard customers, which is a pretty old-school way to sell very new software.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the right kind of AI pitch: narrow, painful, and tied to a real workflow instead of a demo with shiny buttons. The trades do not need another chat toy; they need fewer missed calls and less scheduling chaos. If AI can’t survive a plumber’s dispatch desk, it probably deserves to stay in the lab.
Read more about this at: Sequoia