Lace AI Secures USD 19M to Stop Revenue Leaks in Home Services

• Lace AI raises USD 19M to scale its AI-powered call center revenue intelligence platform
• Founded by Meta and LogMeIn veterans, the startup targets the home services industry
• Their AI analyzes calls to uncover lost revenue and boost conversion
• Following 1000% growth in 2024, Lace AI plans to triple its team and expand capabilities

This April, the Bulgarian American AI-powered sales intelligence platform Lace AI closed its Seed round of USD 19M. Bek Ventures (formerly known as Earlybird Ventures Digital East Fund) leads the round, and other participants included the well-known Bulgarian VC firm LAUNCHub Ventures (invested in Uvionix recently) alongside Horizon VC, Hristo Borisov of Payhawk, Heini Zachariassen of Vivino, and Marcin Zukowski of Snowflake.

Deep AI and Engineering Rooted Founders Identify Pain Point in Home Services

Lace AI was founded in 2020 by Boris Valkov (CEO) and Stanislav Stoyanov (CTO). Previously, Mr Valkov led teams at Meta AI, building the PyTorch AI framework behind breakthroughs like Tesla’s Autopilot and ChatGPT. As for Mr Stoyanov, he was the principal architect at LogMeIn where he helped design and scale its audio/video platform to handle billions of minutes monthly for services such as GoToMeeting.

Before starting Lace AI, they spoke with over 100 companies across a wide range of verticals to find the biggest utility delta—where the gap between the current state and what’s possible with AI was largest—and apply their expertise to drive real business impact.

‘What stood out immediately was the Home Services industry. It’s unique: about 90% of revenue is driven through the call center. Every one of those calls is high intent and high value. And yet, companies were losing millions every month because they had no visibility into why those calls weren’t converting. There were no good tools for understanding what was happening on those calls at scale. Managers were flying blind, trying to piece things together from partial call reviews, gut instinct, and spreadsheets,’ Mr Valkov recalls.

They found that a significant number of high-quality, high-intent leads were not being booked—and no one knew why. These were customers who clearly wanted to schedule service, but the call either wasn’t handled properly, went unanswered, or was misclassified. Having analyzed these calls, the team quantified exactly how much potential revenue was being missed, and the numbers were staggering: the revenue leak reached as much as 15–40%.

This range varied depending on the size and maturity of the business, but the takeaway was clear: Traditional methods weren’t just inefficient, they were costing companies millions.

With their background in AI and large-scale systems, the co-founders found themselves perfectly capable of building a solution that would analyze 100% of calls, detect lost revenue opportunities, and turn call centers into revenue engines—without adding headcount or marketing spend.

‘The Lace team has leveraged their unique combination of enterprise software and AI expertise to create a product that gives the customer the advantages of best-in-class AI technology without needing any technical knowledge,’ Bek Ventures’ managing partner Mehmet Atici states.

The Journey to the AI-Powered Solution Transforming Call Centers into Revenue Engines

The CEO shares that the Lace team went through four major pivots in a rapid search for product-market fit in the first year, drawing valuable lessons from each iteration. Through this process, the team developed deep expertise in navigating the product-market fit landscape, which became foundational.

‘It’s what ultimately enabled us to build a category-leading product for the US home services industry. Once we hit product-market fit, we didn’t stop—we applied the same iterative, fast feedback-driven process to refine our roadmap and double down on what worked,’ Mr Valkov tells ITKeyMedia.

Lace AI operates out of Silicon Valley, with a robust R&D hub in Bulgaria. The founders insist that Lace AI’s Bulgarian team are some of the country’s top engineering talent — ‘one of the highest concentrations of senior engineers in the entire Balkan region.’

‘This depth of experience has been a strategic advantage, powering our ability to move fast, build at scale, and consistently deliver cutting-edge technology,’ Mr Valkov adds.

‘Boris is a truly exceptional founder, not only a product visionary but also one of the most determined founders we’ve ever encountered. We’re thrilled about the world-class team he’s building at Lace, and we plan to continue supporting the company at every opportunity,’ Horizon VC’s general partner Sandy Kory comments.

Lace is a revenue intelligence platform for call centers in the home services and home remodeling space. It uses advanced AI to analyze 100% of phone calls to detect specific lost revenue opportunities, understand why a job wasn’t booked, and provide actionable insights to help CSRs and agents improve performance. In other words, it quantifies exactly where revenue is leaking and helps teams capture it without needing more headcount or marketing spend.

‘Lace’s product immediately resonates with their customers. Cutting through the AI hype and noise with instant value is what will make AI companies win. And Lace’s customers see that – spending up to the equivalent of 10% of what they are already spending on sales representatives’ salaries on the product because they see its immediate impact on revenue,’ Mr Atici highlights.

Radical Upscaling Fresh Capital

According to the co-founders, it was that early grind—those four pivots—that became the engine that powered the startup’s booming growth. Lace AI boasts over 1000% growth in 2024. And with the fresh capital injection, it is now tripling the size of the team to support the momentum. 

‘With the new funding, one of our priorities is to triple in size this year across engineering, go-to-market, and customer success. There’s so much demand in the home services space for what we’re building, and we’re scaling fast to meet it. We’re also deepening our integrations with leading partners and continuing to expand our AI capabilities to provide even more granular, actionable insights for our customers,’ Mr Valkov says.

AI-powered sales intelligence is revolutionizing the home services industry by turning call centers into strategic revenue engines. As competition intensifies, platforms like Lace AI help Home Services providers uncover hidden revenue opportunities and provide data-driven insights that dramatically improve conversion rates without increasing operational costs.