The British Founder Disrupting U.S. Home Services
Most startup founders seeking to incorporate AI into the home services market have aimed their products at the office: scheduling software, call center automation, and dispatch tools. But this means the technician riding from job to job, the person actually behind a company’s revenue, has largely been treated as an afterthought.
Joseph Schwarzmann took a different path. After studying at Cambridge, consulting at Bain & Company on private equity deals in the home services sector, and enrolling at Harvard Business School, he became fixated on the gap between the technology available to office staff and what field technicians had access to. He co-founded Robby in September 2025, where he serves as COO, building a platform designed to serve those technicians directly.
Building His Industry Knowledge Through Private Equity
Schwarzmann’s instinct for commerce showed up early. As a teenager in the UK, he bought and sold number plates, football shirts, and jewelry. At the University of Cambridge, he built his first project, an event app similar to Partiful. While that project didn’t take off, the exercise confirmed something he already suspected: he wanted to build businesses, not study them.
After Cambridge, he joined Bain & Company, where he spent his time on private equity diligence and growth strategy, including for home services companies, seeing how businesses are valued and understood, as well as how owners and investors think about how to create value. He describes the consulting skillset in practical terms, saying, “You’re basically a business therapist. And, in a way, that’s also a bit what founding is like as well. You talk to customers, understand their most painful problems, go on a journey of working side by side, and solve these problems together.”
Through those engagements, Schwarzmann developed a detailed understanding of the mechanisms necessary for a deal to close, working with people he describes as the smartest and most committed colleagues of his career. The pattern recognition he built during that period, where he saw dozens of these businesses from the inside, gave him an operating map of the sector that most first-time founders simply don’t have.
Schwarzmann learned to speak the home industry’s language and understand its incentive structures. But the Bain years also clarified something more personal: he wanted to be the one building the business, not advising from the outside.
Finding His Co-Founders and Developing Robby
Schwarzmann applied to Harvard Business School, looking to access greater resources and talent to develop his ideas. That’s where he met Foroze Mohideen and Vineet Jammalamadaka, two software engineers with experience at top-tier companies, including several YC-backed startups. “I was just looking for people who I really respected: for their personality, their drive, their intelligence,” he points out. “We’re also great friends, so that helps.”
The founding idea arrived by accident. A co-founder’s friend received an unusually large HVAC bill, and the team started pulling at the thread. They talked to technicians, visited job sites, and spent their summer conducting dozens of ride-alongs with local HVAC companies. This gave them a clear picture of the aspects in which the trades were being assisted by AI, and the places where they weren’t.
Call centers and office scheduling have attracted a wave of software tools. But the technician, the person driving from house to house and generating all of the company’s revenue, had almost nothing built for them. “There was a ton of AI in the back office, but not much helping technicians do their jobs,” Schwarzmann said. “And if you think about it, they’re the assets of the business, because they’re the ones that are actually generating all the revenue.”
A Platform for the Technician
Launched in September 2025, Robby is an AI-powered platform designed to serve as a growth engine for home services businesses and a hands-on assistant for the technicians who keep them running. The product handles the administrative work that eats into a technician’s day, like ordering parts from supply houses, answering equipment questions, and documenting customer interactions, so they can focus on the job itself. It also feeds information back to the office and existing FSM system.
The practical result for technicians is they get to delegate mundane, administrative tasks and spend more time spent on billable work. Rather than manually logging customer details, looking up equipment specs, or calling supply houses to place orders, a technician using Robby can offload those tasks to the platform and stay focused on the service call in front of them. That technician-first angle drew the attention of Y Combinator, which accepted Robby into its Winter 2026 batch.
Robby’s long-term vision is to be the assistant for home services technicians, and early customer reactions seem to suggest the idea is landing. The company has secured several early paying customers and raised a pre-seed round to fund its next stage of growth. Schwarzmann and his co-founders are now focused on making sure those first customers succeed while demoing the product to new prospects and feeding what they learn back into the roadmap.
