Unless there’s a plumbing disaster, the roof collapses or… worst of all… there’s a powercut, tech founders aren’t typically thinking about home service professionals. But for Will Wallace and Arwin Rahmatpanah it represented a sector that desperately needed some attention. “It’s an unsexy and thus untouched industry,” says Will. “A lot of software has traditionally neglected this space….”

Will, who has a background as a software engineer and had worked with a couple of YC companies as well as some bootstrap projects of his own, was running an agency that provided web solutions for small businesses when he first noticed the gap in the market. Many of the businesses he was working with were related to home services and he began to hear about their pain points in achieving a digital presence. At the time, LLMs were in ascendance and he saw potential to help people do more without having to invest in a traditional marketing agency. 

Forces combine

In 2024, Will joined Antler. The idea was to build a platform that asked clients a few questions about their business – what they do, where they do it – “and spin them up a website, that’s agency quality in minutes as opposed to days or weeks, and won’t cost them thousands of dollars.” In the months that followed he reached out to Arwin, who he had met at the residency, and they began to talk about how they might make it work. Arwin had a background in data science and was working on an idea to automate insurance workflows for brokerages. But he also had a lot of contact with small businesses, he says, “and I had a pulse on how they operated.” Arwin had secured investment for his own project but when Will approached him, looking for a co-founder who could complement his skillset, the pair hit it off. Soon Arwin was all in: “We decided to combine forces,” he says.

The result? Rebolt, an AI-powered marketing platform tailored for home service pros. Founded by the pair in summer 2024, Rebolt aims to be a one-stop marketing shop, making it easier for self-employed workers and small businesses in the sector to set up an SEO website, optimize their Google business profile, manage social media and build a geo-tagged map to showcase work. In the 18-months since it launched, Rebolt has grown into a 33-person team catering to 1,000+ customers and an ARR in the multi-millions. Momentum started with a $1.6m pre-seed, followed by a $3m seed round in May 2025 and has been building ever since. 

Solving for the little guy

Rebolt solves a number of problems for home service pros, but it mainly comes down to money and time. “These small businesses are financially constrained,” says Will. “They would approach an agency which would say, ‘Hey, yeah, we can do this for you. It's going to be $15,000 for the first build out and then we'll charge you $1,000 a month after that to maintain the website.’” As Will points out, $15,000 just wasn’t tenable for most of these businesses – nor was waiting three months to have it built for them. It left people with two choices –  They could either fork out the money, or try and set something up themselves on Wix, Wordpress or Squarespace. “Which was not gonna get them ranking. It wasn't gonna help them bring in more business.”

Rebolt is designed to serve the lower end of the home service segment. Solo operators, or companies with up to 10 employees – the “early stage” businesses that have the most to gain from the platform. “It's a profound mission for us and our team to empower these folks to have a life and give them more business,” says Will. By focusing on this corner of the sector Rebolt is able to provide the most ROI on the market. “The nice thing about our product is that it generalizes across all the trades,” says Will. “So the requirements for an SEO optimized website across landscaping, roofing, plumbing, HVAC, all these different trades are generally all the same thing.”

Real-world impact

In order to build awareness among the home service community, Rebolt had to work hard – tapping into existing networks. This meant pulling in talent with a reputation in the sector. Arwin spent six months finding the right person who could grow the company, eventually hiring the head of partnerships from Jobber, and making sure the sales team matched the talent on the engineering side. “Selling to these folks, it's kind of like hand-to-hand combat,” says Arwin. “We leaned on folks that had connections already in the space. We went out and partnered with trade organizations and trade schools and people that had these built-in networks. And the nice thing was, they very clearly saw the transformation that we were bringing to the space.”

Now Rebolt is all about product expansion. It started out as a tool to generate a marketing kit and the flagship product was the website generator. Then people asked about social media, “so we built a tool around that,” says Arwin. Then they built a tool to help with Google business profiles. Then one focused on converting business. “They're notoriously bad at answering the phone,” says Arwin. “So we have this AI voice assistant we just launched.” From there the team began to develop a platform that could help manage customers and workload too – from scheduling to quotes. “We realized there's this chance to be the first AI operating system for these companies.” 

What really drives them is the opportunity to have real-world impact, inside the company and out. “We care a lot about the people that we bring on,” says Will. “I genuinely care about them being happy and progressing in what they're doing in life as well as, you know, in the workplace.” It’s how he views Rebolt’s customers too. ”I have worked at startups where if the software we were working on didn't exist, then it wouldn't have mattered…With this it felt like we could make a positive impact on an industry that is the backbone of America but is often left behind.”