Driive, a Lincoln, Nebraska-based startup developing AI-powered booking and scheduling tools for home service businesses, has closed a pre-seed funding round to expand its platform for the trades. The round includes backing from Nebraska Angels, Nelnet, Move Venture Capital, and Luke Hansen, founder and CEO of CompanyCam. The company plans to use the capital to accelerate product development, expand engineering hiring, support go-to-market activity, and roll out its AI booking agent, Dot.
Funding to Target a Persistent Industry Problem
The company is positioning itself around a practical challenge faced by contractors in HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, pest control, windows, and related service categories. Many home service businesses spend heavily to generate customer leads, but still lose revenue when calls, texts, or emails arrive outside office hours. Driive says the issue is especially costly because a large share of inbound demand comes after 5 p.m. or on weekends, when many contractors are not actively answering phones.
The startup’s core product, Dot, is designed to respond to leads around the clock, qualify homeowners, check technician availability, account for real drive time, and schedule appointments in real time. Rather than treating booking as a simple calendar task, Driive is building around the field-service reality that technicians must travel between jobs. That focus on location, routing, and lead qualification is central to the company’s pitch to contractors seeking higher booking rates and more efficient daily schedules.
AI Scheduling Built for Field Work
Driive argues that many scheduling products were originally designed for office-based or virtual appointments, not for businesses that send crews to homes. Its platform is intended to factor in where technicians already are, where they need to go next, and whether a customer request is worth booking. The company says this approach can help reduce wasted miles, limit dead time, and improve the speed at which new customer inquiries become confirmed appointments.
Founder and CEO Quinn Small described the trades as a major segment of the economy still relying on missed calls, manual notes, and fragmented workflows. In the company’s announcement, he framed Driive as a system of record for the way jobs are actually booked, not merely a layer on top of existing calendars. That message reflects a broader push among vertical software startups to build AI tools around industry-specific workflows rather than generic automation.
Investor and Customer Support
The investor group brings a mix of regional startup capital, institutional support, and industry experience. Luke Hansen’s participation is notable because CompanyCam has become a recognized software provider for contractors and field-service businesses. Move Venture Capital’s Charlie Cuddy also pointed to Driive’s early momentum as a reason for backing the company.
Customer feedback highlighted in the announcement centers on drive-time scheduling as a differentiator. Cody Stephens, owner of a generator sales and installation company, said the product helped reduce miles and dead time while increasing the number of daily appointments his team could handle. That early validation is important for Driive because contractors tend to evaluate software based on immediate operational impact rather than long-term technology promises.
Expansion Plans
With the new funding, Driive plans to hire engineers, deepen its partnership-driven go-to-market strategy, and continue rolling out Dot to home service contractors. The CompanyCam relationship is expected to support market access among contractors already familiar with digital tools for job documentation and field operations. For a young startup, that channel could help reduce the cost and complexity of reaching a fragmented customer base.
The announcement also comes as AI adoption in service industries is shifting from broad chatbots toward task-specific agents that can complete operational workflows. In Driive’s case, the workflow is not simply answering a lead, but moving that lead through qualification, availability checks, routing logic, and confirmed scheduling. If the company can execute, it may find demand among contractors under pressure to respond faster while controlling labor and travel costs.
Driive’s pre-seed round gives the company fresh resources to build in a large but operationally complex market. By focusing on booking, drive time, and field-service constraints, the startup is targeting a problem that directly affects revenue for contractors. Its next challenge will be proving that Dot can consistently turn missed or delayed inquiries into scheduled, profitable jobs at scale.