Meet the Baby Boomer whose life changed when 2 Gen Z AI founders walked into her plumbing business. She became their first COO

When Marcelle Flowers’ staff told her that two students were waiting at the counter of her Sacramento plumbing shop, she grabbed her wallet. She assumed they were selling chocolate bars for a soccer team.

“I literally said, you have five minutes,” recalled Flowers, now 62 years old. It was June 2024 and a deal to sell her business, Armstrong Plumbing, had fallen through months earlier. She was also “really opposed to AI,” she told Fortune . She feared it would take her people and “take all the jobs.”

The visitors were AJ Jain and Aditya Ketkar, two engineers in their mid-20s whose energy startup had just fizzled. They had spent that spring walking into about 140 contractors’ shops across Northern California, carrying a diary instead of laptops and offering no sales pitch.

“People were not treating us like salesmen,” Jain said. “Curious kids was, like, our persona,”

They had built exactly one thing worth showing: an automated appointment-reminder call for a San Francisco electrician.

Two years later, their company, Broccoli AI, has raised $52 million across its Series A and Series B. Khosla Ventures led both rounds, with Y Combinator and Operator Partners also participating. The raise was $22 million in Series A and $30 million in Series B, nine months apart, Jain, the company’s co-founder and CEO, told Fortune .

The Series A had not previously been announced. Broccoli is valued at $300 million post-money, according to a person familiar with the matter (Broccoli declined to comment on its valuation). The company had earlier raised in a $1.5 million seed round after going through Y Combinator.

And Marcelle Flowers is now working with the company. She got an apartment in San Francisco to work for them, and her life changed.

“If you had told me that I’d be running an AI company in the heart of San Francisco I would have laughed you out of the room,” Flowers said. “Like, furthest thing from my mind.”

Broccoli sells AI agents to plumbing, HVAC and electrical companies. They answer inbound calls, book jobs directly into the scheduling software the contractor already uses, follow up on open estimates, and renew service memberships.

The company says more than 1,500 businesses now use it, including Ace Hardware Home Services, Mr. Electric and Any Hour Group. In the past seven months it has added roofing, pool care, garage doors, home improvement, and exteriors.

Revenue has tripled since the Series A, Jain said, and headcount has grown from 15 people as of 12 months ago to more than 150. The company said the new money will go toward hiring engineers and salespeople as well as speeding up product development.