The Market AI Can't Touch: Trades Aren't Going Remote

01 /The Concept

Elyos developed a team of AI agents that home-service companies – plumbers, electricians, HVAC contractors, fire safety installers, and others in the trades – can hire to handle the non-technical work that bogs down their operations.

The startup has built six specialized AI agents:

- An after-hours call agent. Its job is simple: don't lose a customer. It qualifies the caller's need, captures contact information, and routes it to a human to follow up during business hours.

- A business-hours call agent. This one has real expertise – it's been trained on plumbing and electrical knowledge bases, so it can ask the right diagnostic questions and pass a human agent a properly framed summary of the issue, not a raw call log.

- A sales follow-up agent. This one calls back leads who haven't responded to outstanding quotes, working through a backlog of warm prospects without tying up staff time.

- A reminder agent. It calls customers before scheduled appointments to confirm attendance, reschedule if needed, collect updated problem details, and brief the technician before arrival so he shows up fully prepared.

- A maintenance scheduler. It proactively calls customers whose equipment is due for its annual service and books appointments at times that work for everyone.

- A technician dispatch agent. Field technicians call in to report job status; this agent logs the information directly into the company's system without occupying the phone lines needed for inbound customer calls.

More than 96% of customers report satisfaction with their interactions with these AI agents. 80% of conversations convert into booked jobs. Companies using the platform save 30% on the administrative labor that would otherwise be required to handle all of this manually.

Elyos is a UK-based company that graduated from Y Combinator in fall 2023, immediately raising £2.5 million. Since then, it has signed "hundreds" of clients – and has now closed a new £9.7 million round (approximately $13 million), which it plans to use in part to expand into international markets this year.

02 /Why It Matters

Elyos has targeted an enormous market. In 2026, the relevant segments will include:

- HVAC installation, repair, and maintenance: $255–280 billion.

- Electrical services: $140 billion.

- Plumbing services: $120 billion.

- Other home services: approximately $560 billion.

These markets are dominated by small and mid-sized companies – meaning there are a lot of them. In the US alone:

- Electrical contractors: 220,000 firms.

- Plumbing contractors: 132,000 firms.

- HVAC companies: 117,000 firms.

"Small and mid-sized" is generous. The overwhelming majority of these businesses are simply small. In HVAC alone, 45,000 US firms have just 1–4 employees, 22,000 have 5–9, 9,000 have 10–19, 5,000 have 20–49 – and the numbers decline from there. There are only 173 HVAC companies in the US with 250–499 employees.

For businesses this small, handling 100% of inbound and outbound calls is a genuine bottleneck. Most staff are technicians in the field – in a trade where every job pays the bills. Phone coverage is either incomplete or expensive.

AI agents like the ones Elyos provides are exactly what these companies need to stop losing potential customers. And naturally, others saw the same opportunity.

Cactus ([related review](/review/sjuda-eshhjo-mozhno-uspet)) – another Y Combinator alum, US-based – built a nearly identical platform for the same market. It originally targeted self-employed tradespeople and home-based caterers, then pivoted to HVAC, plumbing, and electrical contractors and raised $7 million almost immediately in November last year.

WorkHero ([related review](/review/prodavaj-vot-takoj-servis-vmesto-it-platformy)) focuses more narrowly on HVAC, but with a different model: rather than selling AI tools to the companies directly, it offers to take call-handling completely off their hands – with live human agents using AI-powered tools to deliver the service at scale and at a competitive price. WorkHero raised $5 million in its first round in October.

03 /Opportunities

Startuping recently wrote about Moravec's Paradox – the observation that high-level cognitive tasks (chess, math) are relatively easy to automate, requiring comparatively modest compute. But low-level sensorimotor skills – perception, fine motor control, the things a toddler manages effortlessly – require enormous computational resources and remain extraordinarily difficult for AI.

In other words: what we consider hard to do is easy to automate. What we consider simple to do is actually very hard to automate. Which means the vast market of companies delivering skilled-trade services by hand isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

It's therefore a safe bet to invest time and energy in building AI platforms that take the administrative hassle off these companies' plates – things like call handling, which is exactly what the startups above are doing.

But there's more to build for this market beyond front-office automation. Field efficiency is wide open too.

XOi ([related review](/review/tema-v-kotoroj-mozhno-i-horosho-zarabatyvat-i-horosho-prodatsja)) raised $200 million in a single round last February for an app that lets a technician photograph the nameplate on a piece of equipment and instantly receive step-by-step diagnostic instructions, followed by step-by-step repair guidance.

The broader trend: AI won't replace skilled tradespeople anytime soon. The opportunity is in building AI tools that make them faster, better-informed, and less bogged down by everything except the actual work.

Which tasks in this market could you automate with your own AI platform?