Los Angeles, say hello to your newest unicorn.

BuildOps, a West L.A.-based software-as-a-service platform for the trades industry, announced in late March it raised $127 million in series C funding led by Meritech Capital Partners, achieving a $1 billion valuation in the process.

The company was cofounded by Steve Chew and Alok Chanani in 2018 to bring updated software – like automatic scheduling, inventory management, purchasing and invoice tracking – to the commercial trades service.

“I talk to contractors every day – HVAC pros, plumbers, electricians – and they’re busting their backs keeping our world running, but the deck is stacked against them with short staffs, skyrocketing costs, and tech that’s stuck in the Stone Age,” Chanani, chief executive of BuildOps, said in a statement.

Building BuildOps

Chanani, who was born and raised in Torrance, served six years in the U.S. Army. His final tour was after the Iraq War troop surge in 2007, where he and other soldiers were moving currency around a country devastated by U.S. bombs to rebuild hospitals, schools and water purification systems damaged by coalition bombing. It was there that he saw the impact construction and commercial trades had in turning rubble and land back into the bustling community it once was.

Chanani went on to get his Master of Business Administration at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and, after a stint in private equity, started his own general contracting firm. He began working with companies in commercial trades using a hodgepodge of consumer-grade technology like Google Docs and messaging platform WhatsApp despite having a workforce of 100 people and raking in $50 million in revenue annually.

“I’ve spent years watching contractors – guys who keep our lights on and pipes flowing – get crushed by chaos they don’t deserve,” Paul Madera, a partner at Meritech Capital, said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Chew completed his Harvard MBA and went on to help Microsoft Corp. take products like Outlook and Exchange to the cloud. The pair teamed up to create BuildOps, which has raised over $250 million to date.

“There was not a modern platform using the SaaS model where you have a mobile device in the field that can get real-time information back to the office, which changes our customers’ businesses dramatically,” said Chief Operating Officer John Laino.

A new unicorn

BuildOps’ fresh $1 billion valuation puts it in good company. There are about 46 other unicorns in the Los Angeles area according to PitchBook (not including Glendale-based ServiceTitan, another trades-based software platform that achieved unicorn status before going public in December, relinquishing its unicorn status as a result). Seven of the unicorns are business and productivity software platforms like BuildOps, making it the most representative industry of Los Angeles unicorn companies.

The news marks the first publicly announced unicorn valuation of the year in the Los Angeles area.

Achieving unicorn status

Unicorn status has been waning in recent years, bringing the name “unicorn” back to its roots as a rarefied phenomenon. Seven L.A. startups reached unicorn status in 2024, exactly half of what the local startup ecosystem saw in 2021 when 14 startups received a billion-dollar (or more) valuation.

Part of the decline in unicorns comes from a funding correction after 2021, back when venture firms were much more optimistic and generous with their purse strings and global venture funding was at an all-time high. Funding globally fell in 2023 as venture firms became more picky about their investments and valuations followed suit – 78% of unicorn startups globally received their valuation in 2021 and 2022. In Los Angeles, 65% of companies that are currently valued as unicorns gained unicorn status in those two years.

It’s a weird, bittersweet time to be a newly minted unicorn. Venture purse strings are likely to tighten again amid national tariffs and a potential recession looming. Last time this happened, the tech industry saw a massive wave of layoffs due to the inability of startups to raise funding and increase their operational runway. Laino said BuildOps is ready for what may come.

“We support and help commercial contractors manage both the construction side, but also the service side of their businesses. That’s where they’re winning contracts and relationships with large commercial properties or large commercial businesses to service the equipment,” Laino said. “When the economy starts to downturn, those businesses shy away from new capital projects and try to get more out of the equipment they have.”

Competition from another local company

There’s still the $9 billion-valued elephant in the room: ServiceTitan, a Los Angeles neighbor and rival that was, up until a few months ago, a local unicorn.

BuildOps is also looking into practical use cases for artificial intelligence (like planning how long a project will take), an endeavor ServiceTitan announced it was looking into during its quarterly earnings report in January. Both companies also have an expansion strategy that includes partnerships and acquisitions – specifically with payroll management platforms and human capital management systems – in order to be for the trades what Laino says is, “the end-to-end platform that helps them build and grow their business.”

“Our customers, they can’t afford to have a gap in their process,” Laino said. “Otherwise, they have to go get another solution and, for us, that breaks the value chain.”

But while ServiceTitan started as a platform catered to smaller businesses that include residential and general contracting – the company was originally a summer project for cofounder Vahe Kuzoyan to help his father’s plumbing business – BuildOps is singularly focused on commercial trades, which involve a complex web of permits, landlords, building developers and property managers.

BuildOps currently supports five trades in the United States and Canada, but the fresh funding is going towards rapid development. The company has funneled the majority of investment into research and development, the largest department in the company, to perfect product and design and expand its product line to cater to more trades.

“We put quite a bit of investment in R&D, it’s the largest group that we have in the company, specifically our engineering product and design,” Laino said. “Because we know in this space, the best platform is what wins.”