With fresh funding, Billy Stevens is looking to use tech to transform an industry he knows well.
Sera Systems, a business software solution firm focused on the home services industry, reported raising more than $11.7 million, in what Stevens calls a combined seed and Series A round, led by local infrastructure giant Southland Holdings. He said it only took about two months to do so.
“This is a game-changer,” Stevens, founder and CEO, said. “We were actually just meeting people and telling our story, and we ended up raising a Series A… every single person wanted to be involved.”
The Grapevine-based company was born out of issues Stevens saw in the industry, which still relies on old delay-causing systems. Its patent-pending technology allows businesses to automate dispatching technicians. It also tracks marketing and gives client companies an overview of their business’ financials.
Stevens said that by reducing complexities in the process, lowering the number of touches on a project from as many as around 30 to three, businesses can pass along the savings to customers. Sera users have a 90% on-time rate to appointments booked through the software, Stevens added.
“Unfortunately, today's software makes problems worse, because today's software creates more manual inputs. They don't actually do any of the work for you, they make you do more work,” Stevens said. “(Sera) solves the chaos in the office, the hair on fire the entire day, every day in these businesses. These businesses are run by a dispatcher, your entire business is run by one person who is multitasking like no one else.”
Steven’s experience in the industry dates back to 1996 with the local services company Berkeys, which he grew from a team of two to nearly 100, before selling to Alpine Investors and Skylight Capital in 2011.
“And we used to do a lot of what we built in Sera with pen and paper, and a very low functioning software back in the day,” Stevens said. “I just wanted to share what we were able to do in this industry.”
With the new funding, Sera is looking to build out its technology, while growing its team. Currently the company has 16 employees. Stevens said the company expects to have about 60 workers within the next six months in areas like back-end engineering, onboarding and marketing. He said he expects Sera to have between 3,000 and 5,000 users over the next year.
Around the same time Sera was launched in 2018, Stevens launched on-demand services startup billyGo, which he describes as a “beta testing company” for Sera’s technology. Using the software for its mobile app, billyGo has attracted more than 15,000 customers and is expecting to hit $15 million in revenue by the end of the year.
“We automated a lot of the redundancy and complexity. We've simplified how you go to market, we simplified how you handle the service call, we simplified how you re-market to these folks,” Stevens said.
Aided by an increase in people purchasing home services – something Stevens attributes to the amount of time many are spending at home during the pandemic – Sera has its eyes on more verticals in the space. By expanding beyond things like plumbing and HVAC services to include other things like audio/visual and painting services, Stevens said he sees Sera’s market size opening up to more than $1 trillion.
“There is a massive amount of money that is being generated in the space, and our goal is to share in that revenue, in that improvement,” Stevens said. “One of the key things that I wanted to get to is how do we go to market more affordably, but still hit the margins that we want to hit. This is what Sera will help all contractors do.”
