The home services economy in the United States is worth roughly that much every year, but the field service management (FSM) software that runs it adds up to less than half a percent of the same number. The top of the market belongs to ServiceTitan, a public company that has been reaching further into enterprise contractors. The bottom still runs on whiteboards and paper invoices. The business in the middle, the one that has outgrown a notebook but is in no rush to take on an enterprise rollout, has been waiting for a system built for it.
That is the space Workiz is built for, and it is where the company is now staking its growth.
Workiz already runs the daily operations of more than 120,000 professionals across HVAC, plumbing, electrical, locksmith, garage door, appliance repair, and adjacent trades. CEO Didi Azaria, a former Los Angeles locksmith who later co-founded the business intelligence unicorn Sisense, sat down for our Behind the Startup series to talk about how Workiz is positioning itself as the AI field service management platform for growing field service businesses, what AI genuinely handles in a service company and where the real moat sits.
Software has barely reached the trades
US home-services GMV runs to about $657 billion across HVAC, plumbing, electrical, landscaping, cleaning and adjacent trades. The global field-service software market is roughly $2.1 billion. The gap is the room left to digitise, and the room Workiz is targeting. Sources: BDR, Mordor Intelligence, Verified Market Research, Global Growth Insights (2025).
Ishan Pandey: Hi Didi, it’s a pleasure to have you on our “Behind the Startup” series. You went from working as a locksmith in Los Angeles to co-founding a business intelligence unicorn, and then to building Workiz. It’s an unusual path. What did the locksmith years teach you about this industry that someone arriving purely from software might miss, and how does that still show up in the way you build today?
Didi Azaria: I thought it was all about the technical job, but I learned quickly that the technical work almost doesn’t matter if you fail at the customer experience. A customer usually calls because something is broken, urgent, or stressful. If you miss the call, arrive late, or surprise them with unclear pricing, you’ve already lost them. Excellent customer service is just one part of creating that experience. The real lesson was that the job starts before you touch the lock, the pipe, or the HVAC unit.
That shaped how we built Workiz, which is the first AI operations platform for home service businesses. While the technicians do the physical work, Workiz manages the entire customer journey. We built a system that generates demand, captures every lead, books every job, dispatches smarter, keeps customers informed, and turns a completed job into the next one. The system has to help the business look professional before the technician even gets to the door.
Ishan Pandey: Workiz earned its base serving solo operators and small teams, the businesses most software ignored. Lately you have been talking more about the mid-market. I’d love to understand that shift. What does a fifteen to fifty truck plumbing or HVAC business actually need that neither a solo-operator app nor an enterprise platform quite delivers, and what convinced you that this middle is where Workiz should be heading next?
Didi Azaria: The dream of every solo operator is to grow their business into something highly successful. But as they scale, they quickly realize that growth without processes breaks everything. A solo operator needs simplicity to handle calls, book jobs, and get paid. A 15 to 50 truck business has a different problem, and they need control.
They need to know which calls are being missed, which techs are performing, which jobs are profitable, which estimates are stuck, which customers need follow-up, and where the business is leaking money. At that size, the owner can no longer run the company from memory.
Mid-sized businesses need playbooks: hiring, customer service, dispatch, quoting, follow-up, reporting, and everything in between. We help them scale efficiently and bring those playbooks into a system.
Enterprise platforms can solve some of that, but they often bring heavy implementation, high cost, and too much complexity. The middle market needs something powerful enough to run the business, but not so heavy that it becomes a second business to manage.
What convinced us was customer pull.
Our opportunity is to bridge that gap, giving them the structure to manage a larger fleet easily so they can keep growing and become incredibly successful.
The mid-market Workiz is built for
Roughly 24,000 US service businesses sit in the 15 to 49 truck mid-market. Solo apps were built for the 612,000 micro-operators below them; enterprise platforms are built for the 6,000 fleets above. The middle is where Workiz is positioning to win.
Ishan Pandey: ServiceTitan is the name most people in this space know, a public company valued around six billion dollars, and it seems to be moving further up-market toward larger contractors. Workiz is taking a different position underneath that. I’m curious how you think about it from the customer’s side. When a thirty-truck operator is weighing their options, what genuinely makes Workiz the right call, and where are you honest enough to say a bigger platform might serve them better?
Didi Azaria: For a 30-truck operator, Workiz is usually the right call when they want to move fast, improve operations, and avoid an enterprise rollout. They need better call handling, dispatching, quoting, payments, reporting, and customer communication, but they don’t want to spend months training the team or hiring people just to manage the software.
We win when the customer values easy adoption, speed, usability, and ROI. The best software is not the one with the longest feature list. It is the one the dispatcher, technician, owner, and office team actually use every day.
Where would I tell them to go bigger? If they have very complex multi-entity accounting, large-scale custom workflows, deep enterprise integrations, dedicated internal IT resources, or a heavy implementation team, a bigger platform may fit better. If you have 100+ employees and need systems or add-ons we do not support, then you might outgrow us.
We are not trying to be everything for everyone. We are trying to be the best operating system for growing service businesses that need power without enterprise drag.
ServiceTitan is climbing, and leaving room below
ServiceTitan revenue has grown from $180 million to $961 million over six fiscal years, but the company still runs at a net loss and its commercial focus is moving toward larger contractors with the Max agentic operating system. The trajectory opens room underneath that the mid-market has been waiting to see filled.
Ishan Pandey: Your thesis, “automate everything but the wrench,” is a memorable one, and you have an AI assistant named Jessica doing some of that work. I’d love to get into the mechanics a little. In a real service business, what can AI reliably take off a person’s plate today across dispatch, quoting, and customer messaging, where does it still need to hand the decision back to a human, and how do you keep the AI honest rather than just a label on the box?
Didi Azaria: In the service industry, the human touch is everything. AI isn’t going to crawl under a house to fix a broken pipe, and it can’t replace the empathy and trust required when a technician walks into a customer’s home. That human element is crucial, and it isn’t going anywhere.
Where AI has a major contribution is behind the scenes, raising the business to a highly professional level. It is about achieving operational excellence. AI can handle the heavy lifting of business performance, like providing 24/7 availability to capture leads that come in after hours, optimizing dispatch coordinates, and tracking performance metrics in real time. By running these background processes seamlessly, the system lets owners regain control of their operations. We aren’t replacing the human connection; we are using AI to give businesses the infrastructure they need to run flawlessly and maximize their profits.
Ishan Pandey: Growing into the mid-market tends to change the shape of the business itself. Bigger customers cost more to win, expect more hand-holding to onboard, and behave differently when they decide to stay or leave. How does the math of serving a thirty-truck company differ from serving a solo locksmith, and does moving up-market quietly turn Workiz into a different kind of company than the one that got you here?
Didi Azaria: When you reach these massive operations, you are managing a double-sided challenge. On one hand, you have to maintain a laser focus on the actual trades work, ensuring technicians are doing quality repairs and representing the brand well in the field. But on the other hand, a larger operation cannot survive without highly professional operations management. When you have that many moving parts, minor inefficiencies can quietly drain your profits.
AI handles the complex logistical heavy lifting, like predictive scheduling, automated inventory tracking, and identifying real-time revenue leaks.
By optimizing efficiency across the board, the system ensures the business keeps growing its revenues and reaching new heights, allowing large-scale teams to run with corporate precision without losing their focus on the craft.
Ishan Pandey: The trades are consolidating quickly, with private equity and franchises rolling up HVAC, plumbing, and electrical shops all over the country. That feels like it could help you, since larger owners tend to want better software, but it could also work against you if those groups standardize on one enterprise platform or build their own. How do you see consolidation playing out for the mid-market, and how does Workiz stay essential when its own customers are the ones being acquired?
Didi Azaria: Consolidation is a major force in the trades. PE-backed groups and franchises are buying businesses that often have weak systems, inconsistent processes, and poor visibility. That creates risk for us, but also opportunity.
The risk is obvious: an acquirer may want to standardize everything on one enterprise platform. But the opportunity is bigger if we become the system that makes those acquired businesses easier to operate.
Private equity wants profitability, but they do not only care about software price. They care about margin, reporting, repeatability, call conversion, technician productivity, payment collection, and how fast they can bring a new acquisition into a standard operating model. Our pricing can save them a lot versus enterprise platforms, but the bigger point is operational value.
That is where Workiz can be valuable. If we help an owner or acquirer see every call, every job, every estimate, every payment, and every technician workflow in one place, we become part of the operating layer. The more a business depends on Workiz to run the day, the harder it is to rip out after acquisition.
Private equity is rolling up the trades
HVAC PE-backed deal volume has climbed roughly eightfold since 2018, and Apex Service Partners alone now spans more than 300 acquired businesses. For Workiz, the acquired operators inside those platforms are exactly the mid-market customer the product is built for, and the more deeply the software sits inside daily operations, the harder it is to rip out after acquisition.
Ishan Pandey: You’re sitting on years of job, scheduling, payment, and messaging data across more than 120,000 professionals, and it’s tempting to call that a moat. I’d be curious to hear you pressure-test that yourself. Is the defensible thing really the data, or is it the workflow people build their day around, and how do you think about the risk that an AI-native newcomer could recreate a lot of your value with far less data than one might assume?
Didi Azaria: I don’t think raw data alone is the moat. Data helps, but data by itself is not enough. The real moat is being inside the daily workflow of the business.
A service business runs through calls, messages, jobs, schedules, estimates, invoices, payments, technicians, and customers. If your system touches all of those moments every day, you become very hard to replace. Not because the customer loves software, but because the business depends on the workflow.
An AI-native newcomer can absolutely build impressive demos. That is the risk. They may create faster interfaces, better automation, or simpler ways to get work done. We should not dismiss that. Technology alone is replaceable.
But replacing a demo with an operating system is much harder. You need trust, distribution, onboarding, support, payments, communication infrastructure, customer history, and years of workflow habits. The moat is not only what the software knows. It is where the software sits in the business and how painful it would be to remove.
Ishan Pandey: Looking three to five years out, what do you think the system of record for a field service business becomes once AI is handling dispatch, quoting, and follow-up as a matter of course, and does the dashboard as we know it even survive that? And to close, what would you say to founders building software for unglamorous, offline-first industries, where the real challenge is often less about the technology and more about earning the trust of someone who has run their business the same way for twenty years?
Didi Azaria: AI will boost efficiency. One dispatcher will be able to do the job of five. But change is slow. Plumbers, electricians, HVAC techs, and locksmiths will still be here. They will just be more efficient.
The system of record becomes less like a dashboard and more like an operating brain for the business. Today, many systems show you what happened. The next generation should help you decide what to do next.
The system should understand the calls, jobs, customers, estimates, invoices, payments, technician availability, job history, and follow-up. It should not only display information. It should surface exceptions, recommend actions, automate repetitive work, and bring humans in when judgment is needed.
Does the dashboard survive? Yes, but it changes. Owners and managers will still need visibility, accountability, and reporting. But the main interface will become more action-based: alerts, summaries, recommendations, voice, chat, and automation. Less clicking through screens. More running the business by exception.
My advice to founders building in these industries is simple: don’t confuse old-school with unsophisticated. These owners may not talk like software buyers, but they are sharp. They know their margins, their customers, their technicians, and their reputation. If you show up with hype, they will smell it immediately.
You earn trust by solving real problems, being reliable, and respecting the way they already work. These industries move slowly, but if you earn loyalty, you’ll win. The opportunity is huge, but you have to be patient. They do not adopt technology because it is fashionable. They adopt it when it helps them make more money, save time, serve customers better, or avoid chaos.
This interview was originally published on Hackernoon by Ishan Pandey.
