Field services and trades businesses pay Elyos AI to stop revenue leakage from missed inbound calls, turning phone demand into booked jobs without adding headcount. The pain is simple and expensive: when a customer cannot reach a human quickly, they often go back to Google and call the next provider.
UK startup Elyos AI has raised EUR 11.1 million (reported as $13 million) in Series A funding led by Blackbird Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator and Pi Labs. The round brings total capital raised to $16 million, according to the company.
Why this round fits the current field services software trend
This funding is another signal that investors are leaning into vertical, workflow-embedded automation rather than generic AI tooling. In trades and field services, the phone remains the front door for emergency and high-intent work. That makes call handling a high-leverage wedge: if you can answer fast, qualify accurately, and book reliably, you can influence revenue, utilisation and customer experience in one motion.
Elyos AI positions itself around that wedge. Its AI agents handle inbound calls, aiming to reduce missed calls, speed up response times and lower operational overhead. Early customers in the UK report higher booking rates, faster response, fewer missed calls, and lower overhead after adoption, suggesting the product is tied to measurable operational outcomes rather than incremental productivity.
Product depth: where switching costs can form
Call automation in this segment is not just transcription or summarisation. To create durable retention, the system needs to fit into how a contractor actually runs jobs: triage the issue, capture compliance-related details, prioritise urgency, and push structured data into the system of record.
Elyos AI is deepening integrations with leading field service job management systems, which is where switching costs are likely to build. Once call outcomes, schedules, customer history and job notes are flowing end-to-end, ripping out the call layer risks breaking downstream processes and reporting.
A practical indicator of product maturity is emerging in reference accounts. Amax, a London-based fire and security company, reports that Elyos AI agents handle roughly 30% of technical calls without human involvement. Amax Managing Director Tejas Mehta said the platform is so embedded in day-to-day operations that the business "can't imagine" operating without it.
Team-market fit: built inside large UK field services ops
Elyos AI was founded in 2023 through the Y Combinator accelerator program. The founding team has spent close to a decade inside the field services operating environment they are now selling into.
Co-founders Philippa Brown and Panos Stravopodis previously worked at OVO and Bulb Energy, two of the UK’s largest field services businesses. Brown ran operations for over 1,000 engineers, while Stravopodis built the operating system those engineers used. Co-founder Adrian Johnston is a second-time founder who spent years optimising call centres with BCG.
That combination matters in this market. Trades and field services buyers are typically sceptical of tools that do not respect real-world constraints like engineer availability, compliance requirements, emergency triage, and the messy edge cases that show up on the phone.
What the capital is likely to fund
The company has said it plans international expansion in 2026, and it is continuing to deepen integrations with job management platforms. Those two priorities tend to go together: expansion requires repeatable implementation, and repeatability in field services often comes from pre-built connectors into the scheduling and job workflow.
Blackbird Ventures leading the round, with Y Combinator and Pi Labs participating, provides validation from established venture investors that the company can scale beyond early adopters.
Competitive context
The broader market includes call centre tooling, contact centre platforms, and field service management (FSM) suites that increasingly add automation. Elyos AI’s differentiation, based on disclosed positioning, is a verticalised agent that is designed to book and resolve trade-specific calls rather than route them.
The key execution question will be whether Elyos AI can maintain reliability at scale across trades categories, accents, call types and compliance needs, while staying tightly integrated with the systems that dispatch work.
What this enables
- Converts inbound phone demand into booked work with less reliance on staffed call handling
- Builds a workflow layer that can sit upstream of scheduling and job execution systems
- Creates measurable ROI levers: booking rate, response time and overhead reduction
What to watch
- Depth and breadth of integrations with leading job management systems
- Performance on complex technical triage and regulated workflows (eg fire and security)
- International go-to-market in 2026, including channel partnerships and implementation model
- Expansion from call handling into adjacent workflows like follow-ups, rescheduling and collections