Jake Aaron Villarreal: I'm Jake Aaron Villarreal, born and raised in Silicon Valley, here to take you behind the scenes to share what it's like to be a startup founder. The journey they're on, the problems they face, the products they build in an effort to make our lives better. I'm excited to have with us today Justin Tannenbaum. Justin, welcome to the show.
Justin Tannenbaum: Jake, thank you so much for having me. Pleasure to be here. Super excited to be on the pod. Uh, you know, longtime listener, first-time caller.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Really cool. Well, a lot in your background I love. For the listeners that don't know, I'll give you a little background of Justin. He leads the company iVantic, the AI copilot built to help technicians solve any service call. iVantic is building the world's largest repair graph powering triage parts intelligence and real AI agents that cut callbacks and boost time fixes across every field service workflow. I mean, who out there isn't working on something with your hands and building something or fixing something or service industries that need help with AI? And we'll learn a lot more from Justin of exactly how they're tackling this problem. Before we do that, Justin, where are you joining us from today?
Justin Tannenbaum: Nashville, Tennessee, Music City, USA.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: I love it. God, what a town of creation and creativity and technology. I mean, for those that don't know, there's a massive surge in technical innovation coming out of Nashville and talent and companies. So, um excited to to bring Nashville to Silicon Valley, which is where we're based, and and see what kind of story we can tell based on what you're building. I know it's amazing. So, a little bit more before we jump in about you, Justin. Tell us kind of the things that shaped you into really starting from somewhere and becoming an entrepreneur today and kind of some of the maybe the major things that really impacted you being a technology builder today.
Justin Tannenbaum: Yeah. Uh gosh, so first career right out of college and even internship I worked at Electronic Arts. I was in their marketing department and kind of our you know department mission was, you know, "play with, not sell to." I worked on the Madden and NCAA team there.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Nice.
Justin Tannenbaum: Spent some time in the the Bay or outside the Bay in Redwood City. And while working on Madden and NCAA, I would see the QA engineers, you know, catching a pass like 10,000 times, right? Trying to break the physics engine. I'd see the engineers coding and I just remember walking by like the the pod one day and I was like, man, that would be an amazing hard skill set to have. And don't get me wrong, like marketing and sales, I think will always be a great skill set for any recent college grad. I'm not, you know, poo-pooing on it, but I was just like, man, I wanted to have a hard hard skill. And I I was like, I I think this web development, software engineering thing is going to be going to be it.
So I did what any you know 22, 23 year old does and went to YouTube, at the time kind of Khan Academy, and started like understanding what HTML is, what CSS is, JavaScript and you know kind of what web development is and looked like, and obviously was kind of in tech adjacent roles. That really kind of started my foray and interest into software development, technology, um and definitely like shaped a lot of me like who I am today.
From there, you know, I moved back to Tennessee, to Nashville. Often people ask me like what brought me here and I always say, you know, it was a woman, but not a sad country song like many like many of folk who have moved to Nashville on behalf of a woman. That lovely woman's now my wife and uh mother of my my two children. But uh got uh got my start in um you know software engineering, software development, worked my way into product management uh mostly in the healthcare technology space.
And as you mentioned in kind of your introduction here, Nashville is a booming uh tech ecosystem. Most likely, most relevantly, we get known for and and kind of put into a box around healthcare technology. All the major Fortune 500 um healthcare services companies and health systems have a headquarter here in Nashville. So we have a ton of healthcare technology. We also have a pretty uh vibrant startup ecosystem. People building in in the built world, people in in fintech, people in insurance tech. It's not all just healthcare. Of course, we obviously got entertainment and the the services that go along with that. But, you know, I like to say to myself now I'm a recovering software engineer. I'm not coding as much as I as I'd like to be or really am. Just focusing more on on the product and on the business these days. But, yeah, that's kind of some key milestones and key things that really help shape me into the technologist I I think I am today.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, really cool. Everyone has their own path and you know I like kind of where you came from and what you've built, and you know we won't dive too much into this but we also in our previous pod prep call you know you're really a true entrepreneur. You got multiple entities, multiple things going on which if you're interested you could find out more talking to Justin directly, but lots of cool innovation and really just you're an entrepreneur at heart. You look at problems that can be solved with technology and you go out and do it, which is half the battle. You know, I want to just talk about what you mentioned, Madden, because I'm a huge NFL fan and huge Madden sports guy, and you know there was a documentary on Madden and the creation of it and what an enterprise that came to be. Like when you look at what happened there and now you're building your own software company, can you see any parallels, any things that you learned there that you knew that if you did it your way you would do it differently?
Justin Tannenbaum: Man, it's a it's a great question and a tough one. I mean, I would have loved to be in the room like in the early days of what EA looked like early, you know, kind of that zero to one, one to 10, like being the first 50 employees, I think I'd probably be better suited to answer that question. But there's a couple parallels and a couple things I take away from, you know, my time there and elsewhere. One, you know, and not necessarily game development, but I think any innovation development, any product development, whether you're building an API, you're building the next great consumer app, it's all about your people, right? It's all about the culture and the tone you set. It's about hiring great people, getting out of their way, letting them, you know, carry the torch forward, letting them make mistakes, letting them, you know, take ownership and pride and really setting that, you know, the culture for things.
You know, I think the first 10 hires are probably always like the most key of success. Those first 10 set the culture, they set the tone, they set the energy, they set the pace of any new company. And and I think that is probably one of the most overlooked and and uh underrated things about building innovative products or building a new company. It's probably also like the the biggest lesson learned there. And I'm sure, and I'd be curious your thoughts on it, I'm sure you see that uh in your space, right? People are coming to you to work with you or tapping you on the shoulder like, "Hey, we need XYZ engineer. We need I'm trying to source, you know, ABC uh you know, help can you help me source and find it and staff it?" Right? Culture and people is the most important thing.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean it's such an important aspect of the company because technology is is great. It's an idea that you then have to build and with the right people you know on the bus you execute well and you succeed. But you know we kind of look at it as you know you've got people or talent as kind of one bucket, you've got operations of how you actually execute, and then you've got systems and how those systems work and are orchestrated to really deliver you know whatever problem you're trying to solve in the market. So we really own the people side of it, which is a vast majority of companies and it's a big psychology bowl of you know different puzzles to work through and figure out. But at the end of the day it's all about the people, and you know the fact that you've had multiple companies that you've been able to build and manage and just operate is you know really cool. You you've got to have a compass on what type of people you're looking for. It sounds like you've got that. When you look at your current company today, iVantic, for the for the listeners, what what inspired you to create it and let's talk about the problem you're solving there.
Justin Tannenbaum: Yeah. So, kind of I'll tell you about the origin story and maybe allude a little bit touch on my on my background there as well. So, you mentioned I'm an entrepreneur at heart. Have a couple irons in the fire so to speak. One of them is my own software development studio where we build, ideate, maintain um and or become a company's, you know, product engineering team or or partner. iVantic was the first product we built ourselves. Uh but it didn't start out this way. Uh we actually started a product called API Wise and it was really to scratch our own itch uh in uh marrying natural language and you know artificial intelligence to basically chat with any API or any API endpoint.
And the problem we were trying to solve for ourselves is like every uh product engagement or development engagement we have it's like a client always asks, "Hey, can you integrate x y and z system? Can you integrate this API into our workflow you know our system our process?" And you know answer is always yes, but we you know in practicality and in tactical execution of that you find out that these API docs stink and that it is hard to integrate or they're not well written or the use case that you're using them for you know is maybe rough around the the edges. So like we were wondering maybe we can use AI to you know chat with any API endpoint. And so we actually launched the product you know internally, spun it out externally, got through like our alpha testing phase with like the first 100 users, and the feedback was kind of the same. Like it was a bunch of engineers, it was a bunch of like really well-known firms that found us and were testing the product, but we didn't make one sale. No one wanted to pay for the product and the feedback was, "Yeah I was you know I have this you know Jira ticket that I got to integrate this API and their docs stink and I was trying to use your solution to, you know, help me help me with the integration." Um, and so we kind of like went back to the drawing board.
And and I'll never forget it. Uh, the kind of the the key insight and the key story of iVantic was it was about a year ago, middle of winter, uh, snowstorm here in Nashville, which is kind of rare. Um, knocked my HVAC out. Um, and I have a two-month-old...
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah.
Justin Tannenbaum: Two-month old at the time and a 2-year-old at the time. And my first floor uh is no heat and it's like, you know, 15 degrees outside, you know, six, eight inches of snow. And I'm sure you you've been in anything home service related, especially HVAC is just rampant with private equity rollups and uh trying to get them to come out is better, but the pricing is insane these days. So I was getting quotes for like, you know, a 4 ton split unit system was like everywhere from 15 grand to 25 grand.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow.
Justin Tannenbaum: It's just, you know, it's just that it's that time of year. They can kind of name their own price, private equity backed, like prices are sky-high. I was like, this is crazy. So, I was like, you know, I wonder if I can fix it myself. So, I I grabbed the manuals. Uh well, first I went down to to the equipment, unscrewed the the, you know, the service plate, looked at the uh actual data plate, grabbed the serial model equipment information. Um found the manual, the service manual, the parts manual online, and I was like, you know what? I think I might be able to hook this up to my OpenAI uh account. So, I wrote a little Python script, hooked that up, dropped in my my uh files, and I started like talking to the equipment, like if I was a servicer, and I didn't know what to do, and it led me to like figure out like what was wrong with my equipment. Turned out I had a cracked heat exchanger, and it's like very dangerous because it can leak gas all into your place. So, I had to buy new equipment anyway. But, I was actually able to like triage and diagnose what was wrong with my HVAC. And I'm not an HVAC tech. So I said, "Huh, I think there might be something here. I think this might be worth a hard pivot into, you know, I guess the the the industry lingo now is like, you know, vertical, you know, SaaS or vertical AI solution."
And, uh, you know, immediately we didn't pivot. I immediately contacted everyone in my network who owned a service company. My old high school friend Ben, shout out to him, he took me up on the offer, uh, allowed me to come out to Dallas, Texas, and shadow his entire service crew. I ran service calls, did a rotation in the CSR office in their parts warehouse, and I had this like rinky-dink you know alpha prototype of the potential pivot. And I'll never forget it. I have my my kind of alpha prototype there just like testing the hypothesis like can this work. I'm sitting with the service manager inside, you know, his uh 60 person um you know, their appliance, the nation's leading, not largest, nation's leading Sub-Zero Wolf Cove appliance repair in Dallas. And uh we're fielding, I'm sitting with the service manager. We're fielding calls. His technician calls. I have my uh app up on the speaker phone. Um and the technician, "Hey, I'm working on a Sub-Zero, you know, 650, error code ABC123 is popping up. What does that mean?" And the service technician is about to like touch his mouse, open up the browser, and log into the manufacturer to like pull the manual and look up the error code. I just capture that data on our app, hit send before he can even double-click the Chrome browser. App responds back, "It's XYZ." He looks at me, I look at him, my mouth's wide open, his mouth is wide open. And we had like both had this like aha moment that we were actually on to something and how AI can uh be an assistant to technicians out in the field and really even a productivity enhancer for in the office. And it was at that moment a light bulb went off, hard pivot, turned the engineering team around, flew back to Nashville. I was like "Guys, we're all in on this." So that's kind of our origin story from uh you know a very cold winter with you know two small kids and a wife to uh now one of the leading AI agents uh for field service management in the country.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Wow. That's amazing. I love that because everybody has essentially one of those systems that you have and they break down and you have to get them replaced, and but you're really helping the service providers do their job better and faster and cheaper and with more accuracy which ultimately helps the customer and helps them too. So that's really I like that win-win-win solution. If you look at the product that you started to build, so that was really how you built it. Do you remember your very first customer that you actually then went to market and started to see either leads coming through to your website or companies starting to use it? How did how long did that take?
Justin Tannenbaum: Yeah, it it uh took about 4 months and everything just started like clicking inbound. Like I wasn't out selling. We we really were selective like the first handful of customers we did pilots with. So we were still just you know really just a team with a hypothesis, right? We were out there just trying to prove it, and uh you know the system had some bugs and it was a rough alpha. That first kind of three pilots, every client converted and started paying and found value in it. We went through a beta and they they continued to pay and continued to add and request more things. Um and then everything just scaled like inbound from there. I think you know it's a it's a combination of a couple things. One, it's an absolutely massive TAM, right? If you talk about just like field services in general across appliance, HVAC, commercial kitchen, commercial equipment, generator service, etc. So, one, massive TAM. Two, we get to ride the AI wave, right? These frontier models are now great enough to enable us to to do the things that we want to do. Um, and then three, you have uh an industry that has a 75,000 technician shortage over the next three to five years, right? It's a techs are aging out. All of our good techs are retiring. They're entering, exiting the workforce, and we don't have enough technicians to backfill or replace them, and we can't onboard them fast enough or train them fast enough to retain them. So kind of a combination of like all those three, kind of like a perfect storm to uh launch us or propel us forward into kind of this inbound flurry of requests, qualification, demos, pilots, post-implementation, go live, payment, etc, and that's where we are today.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, really cool. You know, I had mentioned like ServiceTitan, some other big companies that are, you know, in the market. Where do you fit? Where does your application fit in? It's agentic, it's AI, it's AI agents, I'm assuming.
Justin Tannenbaum: Yeah.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: So, like where does it fit in in the market?
Justin Tannenbaum: Yeah, we've purposely like steered clear, at least temporarily, of becoming like a business management software. So, the ServiceTitans of the world, the uh Housecall Pro, the Jobber, the ServiceTrades, the Service Fusion. I mean, there's dozens and dozens of, you know, all-in-one, you know, uh, solutions. Uh, we've purposely kind of, uh, sidestepped all that and we really see ourselves as the AI uh, middleware where we can sit on top of or next to your business management software and integrate with it. Um, and really how we integrate is we actually pull all of your past work orders out of those softwares and do a training run for the AI on it so that it has context. It has your data, the diagnosis, the symptoms, the parts used, it has the intelligence of all that locked, you know, data inside inside the business management software. We call that kind of, you know, first-party data. And then we've got a whole bunch of proprietary secret sauce uh for third-party data that we layer in. You know, think service manuals, installation guides, warranty guides, parts manuals, parts catalogs, distributor catalogs, etc., that we can, you know, mash together to really give the technician kind of that that second brain or kind of AI powered brain.
So, we're kind of sitting on top of or in between the technician and their business management software. Um, and we, you know, we view ourselves as um kind of that AI middleware, AI layer, intelligence layer. And we take it a step further is like once we're integrated with the business management software, we've done the training runs, right? Then we can actually go from reactive and historical to proactive intelligence. Meaning our service agent, we call our service agent, uh he can actually start pre-triaging all of your future jobs. So Jake, say you own a HVAC company. You want us, we're your, you're a client of ours. You can actually tap our service manager agent to look at all of your work orders and jobs for tomorrow. And in 48 hours in advance, we're able to grab the the customer data. We're able to grab the equipment data. We're actually able to pre-triage and pre-diagnose and make part recommendations before your technician ever rolls to the homeowner, to the building's, you know, shop. Uh so they're coming with a a service plan in hand and therefore, you know, increasing their first call completes, improving gross margin and really helping that service company hit their hit their uh revenue numbers.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah.
Justin Tannenbaum: And then it gets, you know, more fun and we got all sorts of bells and whistles beyond that. But that's one of like the key workflows of our service agent.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. That's really cool. So talk about the service agents. How many do you have today and how are they defined? You talked about the one you just explained. Are there other agents within the application?
Justin Tannenbaum: Yeah. Yeah. We actually have three agents live today. Technically, there's more, but we we brand them as three. We have our our service manager agent. Our service manager agent can uh triage, can diagnose, can help a technician like with step-by-step guidance. It can help a green technician or a newbie, you know, technician have all of the knowledge of an older tech or answer any kind of question about the piece of equipment or the customer that they're they're visiting or seeing. And uh as well the service agent can help the technician write their post-job visit summaries, like what they did. Use correct grammar, correct English, just some kind of like little productivity gains and kind of help the technician automate some of the data entry, right? Technicians don't want to sit in front of your house for 15 minutes and type up their notes, right? They want to go get on the road to their next call. They want to fit in another service call. They want another chance for commission or their spiffs or however, you know, they're they're incentivized. Or, you know, heck, they want to get home 15 minutes sooner to their to their family, right? And so they're not burned out. So that that's one of the things our our service agent does.
Our parts agent can break down equipment into exploded, you know, diagrams and views. It can give uh part recommendations. It can tell you part uh name, part description, part number, uh part substitutes. Uh it can break down equipment into its serial ranges or serial breaks so it has the correct parts. It can tell you what parts are where. uh it can authenticate as you and actually go to your preferred distributor or distributors and source parts uh location and who has the best pricing for a part uh and it can do everything kind of like parts you know uh um related or it can say "Hey, we actually have this in stock, we don't have it in stock," etc.
And then we just launched our HR agent um that can assist field service companies with answering kind of the same HR related or SOP related questions that techs have like, "What's our vacation schedule? Do we have tomorrow off? How many vacation days do I have?" Kind of or you know, "What's our uniform policy? What's what's this policy?" Really deflecting and allowing technicians to self-service or you know deflecting all these questions from going to management or to an owner of a service company. Um and that's our a third agent we just launched.
And uh we're gearing up for for quite a few more. We're starting to think about uh route optimization and dispatch agents. How to like, you know, optimize our route based off of the technician's skill set uh or the technician's familiarity with equipment, right? You might be fantastic at HVAC and, you know, stink at uh Trane HVAC but are great at Goodmans, right? Just as a bad example, you know, if you if you're horizontally integrated, like you might be great at HVAC, but really bad at appliance. So, let's send the other tech in your area who's great at appliance on this service call, right? So we can increase that first call complete. So, we're looking at that. We're looking at voice and phone and that kind of CSR function. So after hours call or uh inbound support when peak hours, what does that look like? And there's just so much room for, you know, uh agents and kind of workflows here for us to uh really innovate and lead.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Yeah, that's really cool. Yeah, I like the fact you've got a plan for multiple agents that you'll orchestrate that will help run companies better. And I like the routing aspect of putting the right people on the right projects at the right time 'cuz you know we see that all the time here. We live in a small town, but even like they they have their we have our own like Uber service that's paid for by the city which is not Uber. Uh it's not any third party. It's actually vehicles purchased by the city and it's it's free for the citizens which is really cool. The challenge is the routing is just totally upside down. You know, people plug in when they want someone to come and pick them up and it could take 10 minutes, it could take 35. Like the routes are just not optimized. AI is like perfect opportunity there for that system. But if you look at like your company today and you think, "Okay, where do I want to be in 18 months?" What's the gap between what you need to do or want to do and to achieve what you want to do in 18 months? Is it a is it a people problem? Is it an operational problem? Is it a systems problem?
Justin Tannenbaum: It's not a systems. I think we we've our product is pretty awesome. Uh and I, you know, probably gonna give myself a pat on the back for that one and my co-founder Lucas. It's not really like a problem. It's not like a product problem right now. I think the problem for us to get to where we want to get to in the next 18 months is really two things. Like one, it's it's understanding distribution and like how we get more people to to know about us, right? Um and like we're we're working heavily on on that right now. Like what levers to pull, like what does paid performance looking like, what is you know organic content and SEO and everything look like? And it's also, quick side note, it's also like a weird time in technology to be building right because with Claude Code and and uh you know OpenAI and all the the models out there like it's not that we're vibe coding but there is like pieces of our product that we're kind of vibe coded, or you know there's unit tests and integration tests that a human engineer didn't write but like we prompted our way to in our product. But so it's not really like a product problem. It's more a distribution problem.
And then I I think part of that is also a people problem. You know, we are exploring raising uh a round of funding to kind of put pour some gasoline on the fire here and part of that is like people, right? We actually can't keep up with demand of implementations. We're kind of resource constrained at the moment. So I'd say it's it's it's a distribution problem. It's a people problem. And then maybe you know third tier say is a data problem because we we have a really you know big vision, right? It's become the nation's, world's largest repair graph. That's a pretty big hairy audacious goal. There's a lot of manufacturers, there's a lot of pieces of equipment out in the world that that we would need to scale on and to train, have data on. So part of it is just um you know super fragmented ecosystem across like equipment across you know the the field service world. So training data but we we've got this product to solve that. It's just a matter of sourcing it and and running our training models on it. So yeah...
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Got it. Yeah. Sounds like a startup. Got a lot, a lot going on, a lot to think about how to prioritize what to focus on and how to get it done. People are obviously the backbone of the company. When you look at AI today, what we're seeing in the market is there's one kind of blind spot that a lot of founders in AI startups in particular are learning and the ones that are achieving a lot of success right now from what we're seeing and they're hiring a lot is the companies that are making sure that their deployments and their implementations are successful. So the drop off is not huge and how they're doing that is through you know forward deployed engineering and some companies have them and some don't and some don't even know what it is or the titles are solution engineer but they're not really like business acumen developed and you can't put certain people in front of certain problems to get the answers you want. Vice versa you got too much of the salesperson and not the technical and they fall down. So that's where we're seeing a lot, a lot of demand in your sort of structure of a company. Is that part of your plan or do you already have that in place today?
Justin Tannenbaum: Yeah. Uh I think I'm probably like every other, you know, AI, you know, startup at the moment where early pilots, you know, either succeed or fail during their implementation. And I think it's probably a little bit more true in enterprise. And and I was going to say like, aren't forward deploy engineers really just like a new brand for solution engineers? Like it's kind of like the new, the new thing on Twitter X. Like I think I I read something this morning from Harry Stebbings about you know deploying for in Fortune 500 companies it's no longer just enough to have implementation or customer success you know implement or be there. You have to have a FTE right, forward deploy engineer to to see it success. Um I think I'm like a lot of other startups and I have made that mistake of doing it without and you know had a had a pilot that I thought was going to go really well and didn't. Um, or seen like usage just fall off a cliff as soon as we like hand it over from implementation to success.
So, I think there's a ton of value in forward deployed engineers. I I think it makes a ton of sense, especially if you're selling up market into the enterprise or like upper, you know, upper middle market. Where it doesn't make a ton of sense maybe is like the SMBs, right? It's like you really only need 10 people adoption or if you're selling into like a HVAC company that only has you know seven techs you know and two people in the office and an owner, like there's only so much FDE can do there.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah.
Justin Tannenbaum: But I think it's more like from your implementations about like productizing the implementation as well as making it the product easy to onboard and and ramp and so that your your customers can reach that aha moment quickly. You know, for us, I think as soon as we get that, we get integrated to their business management software, that's like our like sticky point, right? As soon as soon as our agents now pre-triaging all of your future calls and future jobs, like that's a that's a big um like it's hard for, you know, it's hard for a company to shut that off or like not see the value. Um because typically in the past how that would work is they have to pay, pay someone probably full fully burdened you know 95k a year uh to do that job and our AI agent can do it you know for 10% of that right. Um so that like that's interesting but I I think as we continue to implement clients and we continue to grow and candidly we continue to move up market, I think the forward deployed engineer model makes a ton of sense. Standardizing data and assisting clients with their data, a lot of clients don't really understand or or know what they have or how to get to it. Um or tweaking, you know, some meta-prompts or something that's very specific to a client. I think I think the concept makes sense, but let's just call it what it is. It's it's solution engineering, you know, 3.0.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, exactly. Well, really cool to kind of hear where you guys are at as a company. We look at your company today. Is iVantic augmenting human technicians or are they eventually replacing them? And I think I know the answer to it, but you know, from your perspective, what are your thoughts there? And and how do you see the service, the field service workforce, and what's that look like in 10 years if you succeed?
Justin Tannenbaum: 100% we're augmenting them. There is no AI uh at least I don't think in the next three, five, and maybe even 10 years, there's no AI that's going to turn a wrench on a uh refrigerator sealed system. There's no AI that's going to come in and replace the door gaskets on your refrigerator. There's no AI that's going to come in and fill your HVAC up with, you know, Freon. So, we 100% are augmenting uh a workforce that's burnt out, that's tired, that's aging out, and that we don't have enough of. We are upleveling, you know, new techs. We are making current techs more productive so that they can have an extra service call a week or two, or they can get home to their family 30 minutes, you know, quicker every day because they're not doing the the mundane data entry or data tasks that an AI is perfect at. uh we're augmenting those technicians with that second like AI intelligence brain in their pocket, right? So they don't have to carry around binders of manuals in their truck. Everything that we do, we are optimizing for the technician's experience to be that catalyst to make them the most productive that they can be to help them and definitely by no means replace them.
And to your second part of your question, where do I see you know field service in in 10 years? I I don't know if it's necessarily field service, but I think it's any business, right? How are we using, you know, I actually talk to a lot of techs. I talk to a lot of service company, you know, execs and they're they're like, "Man, it's just another tool, right? It's just like having a screwdriver or, you know, the hammer in your tool belt. A tool is a is still a tool and a fool with a to a tool is still a fool, right?" But [laughter] but I I still think I believe that you know AI uh whether you want to call them you know AI wrappers or or these new vertical uh agents um they are all just going to be productivity gains that make our work workforce more productive, more intelligent um and and those that leverage it today and get ahead of it will be that much ahead of their competition and and be ahead of the game than those that wait.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, well said. I'm going to play devil's advocate here a little bit. There's lots of companies building AI agents and the landscape's exploding. Everyone's building agents. As you look at your business, is there a technical moat or is there something that's hard to replicate that you can kind of fend off the competition that you know may also be building something similar?
Justin Tannenbaum: Yeah, that's a that's a really good question. I think we have a pretty I think we're positioned us and and a couple of our competitors are really well positioned in terms of of a moat of one uh domain experience and domain expertise. You can't just go into like a new market and say, "Hey, my agent's going to automate this," if you've never been in, like if you've never done that job, or like you've never actually run service calls before, or you've never spoken with a service company owner or you've never spoken to a service company manager or you've never turned a wrench on a piece of equipment. So, one, I think it's it's that. Two, I think field service in particular is interesting because, no offense to to your listeners in in SF or Silicon Valley, but like it's not a sexy industry, right? They want to go build AI for self-driving cars. They want to, you know, build go join Anduril and build, you know, the future of war. No one, no one wants to come work in like AI for your HVAC, your refrigerator, your oven, your microwave, right? But I think that's what makes this industry exciting to me.
And then three, it's a it's a data moat. Our unique, you know, value prop is because we source first party and third party data, there there's just a massive there's a massive undertaking that a comp, competitor would need to have to uh challenge us or or to come in. Many have tried even before us. I think many tried and failed. But uh you know I think we've got the right people, the right product, the right uh systems processing in place that uh we're starting to see the the fruits of our success and have a very defensible position in the market.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Really cool. What's the business model for those HVAC owners out there or anyone out there that's like, "Hey, I want to try this company"? Like what's what's that look like for them to pay or is it a monthly subscription? Is it uh per seat? What's that look like?
Justin Tannenbaum: Yeah, great question. Uh so unlike our competitors, you can head over to ivantic.com/pricing. All of our pricing is is transparent, simple, uh and open for all. Uh right now it's it's a a per-seat license fee. I think it starts at $39 a month per technician, up to 59 per technician. And then we typically do an implementation fee to get you up and running on that initial training run or you know two after that with our forward deployed engineer to make sure they're successful. [laughter]
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Nice. I like it. Well, excited to kind of see how things go for you. What are you excited about as we head into 2026? Is there anything on the road map that we haven't discussed that you know you're like gearing up to build or promote?
Justin Tannenbaum: Yeah. Uh we're super excited kind of uh into 2026 is we're going to be entering kind of the uh billing side of things, kind of our our billing agent or our price book agent. So helping technicians and service company owners, you know, do profitable work and really kind of build tooling around that. Um and then kind of financial integrations. A lot of our customers are asking, you know, for uh kind of the FP&A side of what agents can do. So I think I'm really stoked about what that looks like in 2026.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Wow. That's amazing. Well, before we jump off here, you're also launching a podcast, right? So, tell us a little bit about that. What was the inspiration behind that, man?
Justin Tannenbaum: Jake, you were the inspiration behind that! [laughter] Yeah. No, thank you for bringing it up. We're launching our own podcast called Agents of Change. A podcast all around uh AI agents and talking to industry uh folks both in field service and outside of field service about uh AI and AI agents and how folks are using AI inside their companies or inside their uh service companies. Tips, tricks, tools of the trade, talk and shop, and really just diving deep into all things.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Exciting. Well, I'll be your first subscriber when you launch and look forward to hearing and learning from your network as well. Um, I want to thank you, Justin, for coming on and sharing your your company and what you're building and excited to keep keep in touch with you and see what happens in the future. And I also want to thank the listeners for listening today. It means a lot to me you spent your time with us. I'm your host Jake Villarreal signing off for now, but can't wait to catch up with you all on the next episode. Until then, Justin, the world take care. If you like what we're doing, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen, and follow us on YouTube where we go behind the scenes to learn what it takes to be a startup founder.
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