Our Investment in Topline Pro: Vertical AI for capturing the long tail of SMEs

Photo: Co-Founders Shannon Kay and Nick Ornitz

In 2023, we shared our thesis on “AI Businesses-in-a-Box”: the potential for AI to transform operations for offline, leaner (often solopreneur-led) SMEs, while allowing them to maintain their independence. 

Today, we’re excited to announce that we’re leading a $27M Series B round into Topline Pro. Founded by Nick Ornitz and Shannon Kay, Topline promises a step change in vertical SaaS for small businesses. With LLMs and reasoning agents at its core, they’re transforming both what software can do and how it’s delivered to customers.

The Long Tail is (Still) Very Long

Vertical SaaS has always focused on the high end of the SME market. Few, if any, have successfully served on the long tail. This is the 2.5M+ home services businesses in the US. Roughly 2M of these are led by solopreneurs; another 400,000 have fewer than 10 full-time employees. 

These businesses, which answer your call whenever you need your windows cleaned, your garage door fixed, or your garden tended to, are the backbone of local economies. So why have they been underserved by software?

Building for this market has always been a CAC/LTV challenge.

LTV: Even the best vertical SaaS platforms are often too rigid or complex for busy small business owners. Adoption requires time, training, and a reorientation of workflows. That’s a hard ask when your hands are literally full with landscaping tools, plumbing parts, or paint cans. As a result, ROI and retention—and thus LTV—have been chronically low.

CAC: At the same time, customer acquisition remains human-intensive. These owners don’t hang out on Product Hunt or browse SaaS review sites. You have to call, sell, onboard, and support at scale. Traditional PLG motions rarely work, which means CAC stays stubbornly high.

Software That Does the Work

Then came LLMs and AI agents. For the first time, software doesn’t just digitize workflows; it actually does the work. Topline Pro isn’t just an app. Their software can launch a professional website, write SEO-optimized blog posts, manage a Google Business profile, and autonomously manage customer reviews. Topline also has automations for sales, estimating, and quoting. Get work, win work, do work. 

All this can happen through natural language. Embedding conversational AI in the product is transforming customization: rather than users having to adapt to the platform, the platform adapts to the user. Users chat directly with their software as if they were texting a marketing assistant or sales associate, to configure and customize it to their own needs. A landscaper can text a photo of a recent job and approve suggested website content without leaving their messaging app.

This is a radically better interface for a historically offline customer base (80% of Topline’s customers didn’t have a website before using the platform). We’ve seen how intuitive, purpose-built AI interfaces can meaningfully improve adoption, and we expect some industries to fully leapfrog traditional SaaS tool adoption in favor of “done for me” tools. Topline is proving that this can be done in home services.

Marketing and Sales are just the first step. We see limitless future opportunities, such as capturing payments, gathering data, or group purchasing. 

On this latest investment, our Partner Molly Alter says: “Topline is not just layering AI onto old workflows. They’re reimagining how software can do the work for small business owners. What excites me most is how deeply the product resonates with its users. These are busy, ambitious entrepreneurs who rise at 6 AM to tackle their first project of the day and don’t have time to deal with administrative tasks or marketing. Finally, they have a platform that works as hard as they do.”

Redefining the LTV/CAC Equation

In addition to their customer-facing AI products, the Topline team has also leveraged AI in their own GTM and operations, utilizing it to create personalized sales outreach, enrich leads, and automate customer support. This has enabled the company to scale quickly and efficiently, achieving rapid growth while engaging and retaining a large and diverse customer base. Topline’s external AI products are highly differentiated, but their internal AI products enable them to actually deliver their software to customers at scale. 

These product and operational innovations are transforming the economic equation:

• Higher LTV: Because Topline’s agents generate more revenue for customers and vastly improve adoption, it earns a stronger place in their workflows and budget.
• Lower CAC: With scalable, AI-powered GTM tools, Topline can reach and support customers without the traditional headcount-heavy cost structure.

The results? To date, Topline Pro has helped thousands of home service professionals generate over $655 million in booked business, with customers in all 50 states. 

This is a pivotal moment for Topline to capture an undeniably vast market, one that has been historically underserved by technology. 

But AI itself is not a panacea. Building for this segment of business owners who spend nearly every waking hour in the field is highly challenging. Only someone with firsthand knowledge of the problem can build a product that truly works on behalf of professionals while adapting to their unique business circumstances. This is why we’re excited to back Nick and Shannon, who both have deep personal ties to the trades and a keen understanding, as well as an ambitious vision, of how generative AI can transform the industry. We are excited to partner with Nick, Shannon, and the Topline Pro team as they continue to revolutionize the home services industry.