Bulgarian-led Lace AI raises $19M to revolutionize home services
Lace AI, one of the fastest-growing startups to emerge from Bulgaria, announced the closing of $19 million in seed funding. The round was led by Bek Ventures, with participation from leading global firms LAUNCHub Ventures, Horizon VC, and an elite group of industry titans, including Snowflake co-founder Marcin Zukowski, Vivino founder Heini Zachariassen, Payhawk co-founder Hristo Borisov, and other billion-dollar startup founders.
Already used by home service businesses ranging from $5M to $2B in annual revenue, Lace is defining the new standard in voice AI, focusing on using the new funding to deepen their R&D initiatives and AI advancements.
Lace AI: Transforming home services with AI
In the $650 billion home services and remodeling industry such as spanning HVAC, plumbing, roofing, and more, most revenue still comes through phone calls. Yet, companies struggle to understand why high-intent callers don’t book. Traditional methods rely on manual call reviews and incomplete metrics, leaving managers in the dark and leading to a 15–40% revenue leak.
Lace AI is built to fix this. Its cutting-edge AI analyzes 100% of inbound calls, instantly classifies outcomes, identifies missed opportunities, and offers targeted coaching insights—no extra marketing spend or headcount needed. Customers using Lace have seen up to 98% booking rates and 35% increases in net sales with zero additional overhead.
“We built Lace as the AI-native revenue intelligence platform purpose-built for the $650 billion home services industry, a sector long overdue for transformation. What sets us apart is our relentless pace of innovation and our ability to execute fast. That’s how we’ve been able to drive 1000% growth in a single year, and we’re just getting started,” says co-founder Boris Valkov.
Backed by top VCs and AI pioneers
Lace AI was co-founded by Boris Valkov, an AI leader who previously led foundational projects at Facebook AI, including the development of PyTorch and scaling the distributed training of trillion-parameter machine learning models. “I’ve seen firsthand how elite AI technologies are often locked inside the walls of tech giants,” said Valkov. “With Lace, we’re unleashing that power into one of the world’s largest, most underserved industries—and the results are staggering.”
Lace’s Sofia-based R&D center is now one of the largest AI hubs in the region, powering the company’s continuous innovation in call center understanding and performance coaching.
The company’s rapid growth and transformative impact have drawn backing from some of the top VCs in the U.S. and Europe, with deep experience scaling category-defining companies.
“Lace’s product immediately resonates with their customers. Cutting through the AI hype and noise with instant value is what will make AI companies win. And Lace’s customers see that – spending up to the equivalent of 10% of what they are already spending on sales representatives’ salaries on the product, because they see its immediate impact on revenue,” says Mehmet Atici, Managing Partner at Bek Ventures.
