How an Indian man turned 'missed calls' into million dollar business

Take a look at your phone right now. How many missed calls do you see? For most of us, that’s just a number sitting on the lock screen. But for Apurva Shrivastava, an Indian-origin man, that number turned into a business model from which he built a company now valued at close to 8,300 crore rupees.Meet Apurva Shrivastava, the MIT engineer who built a career on missed callsApurva Shrivastava grew up in Michigan, where his parents ran a small business. As a teenager, he would help them. It was during this time that he noticed how every missed call was a job walking out of the door. The customer would call someone else and, just like that, it would affect their business.Shrivastava studied computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 2022, he co-founded Avoca with Tyson Chen, a fellow MIT graduate whom he met during a poker night. Chen’s mother ran an acupuncture practice in Pennsylvania, and he also knew what a missed call meant for business. They had both lived different versions of the same problem as children answering phones for family businesses that could not afford to lose a single lead. So they attempted to build an AI answering service for restaurants. “When a restaurant misses a phone call, that’s a $30, $40 order,” Chen told Fortune. “When a home service business misses a phone call, that could be a $30,000–$40,000 HVAC install they’re missing. So, instantly, we thought: ‘Wait, this is a completely different order of magnitude.’” They spent an afternoon with Rescue Air and realised that, if they could solve this problem, it could be massive. In 2023, they built a product specifically for Rescue Air, which helped Shrivastava and Chen land their first customers.The company builds AI voice agents for home service businesses, such as plumbers, electricians, HVAC technicians and roofers. According to Shrivastava, they make up what he calls the physical economy. Instead of calls going to voicemail or a hold queue, the AI agents pick up instantly. They are built to sound convincingly human, so you will not suspect a thing. What actually sets the product apart is the integration underneath it. The AI does not just take a message. It checks a company’s live calendar, books the appointment directly into the system, and follows up on old quotes that were never signed. That is the kind of follow-through most small contractors do not even have the staff to manage.According to Fortune, the company has raised more than $125 million over the last couple of years, valuing it at $1 billion.In 2025 alone, the HVAC industry was worth about $50 billion, with a projection of $75 billion by 2032. “This is a huge growth moment in the home services economy,” Shrivastava told the publication. “All these stories are coming out now that basically say, ‘with all that’s happening in AI, the next million-dollar job is the job of a plumber, the job of a technician… What Avoca has realised is that these people are the main characters. No AI wave is replacing the job of a technician, at least in the next five years.’”Interestingly, the whole company was built on the same instinct Shrivastava learned as a child in Michigan: answer the phone. Someone on the other end needs something.Get the latest movie news, reviews, and celebrity updates. Download the TOI App.