Cactus
YC X25San Francisco, US · Founded 2024 · 2 employees · 4 known investors
Cactus automates lead response and customer re-engagement for home service businesses, ensuring calls are answered within 60 seconds and dormant CRM contacts are converted into repeat bookings.
Also known as Cactus AI · Cravd
AI & Machine LearningEnterprise SoftwareSaaSArtificial IntelligenceB2BHome ServicesUnited States of AmericaAmerica / Canada
Founders & leadership· Y Combinator alumni (X25)
Cactus was founded in 2024 by Ajith Govind and Avinash Joshi.
AG
Ajith Govindin𝕏Co-Founder & CEOAjith Govind is a computer science-educated entrepreneur who previously founded Turing Labs, which raised over $20M in Series A funding and worked with major consumer packaged goods companies. He is now building Cactus, a platform for home service businesses.
AJ
Avinash Joshiin𝕏Co-Founder & CTOAvinash Joshi is a full-stack developer with experience shipping products across multiple programming languages and frameworks, including Rails, Python, Django, React, and Angular.
Investors · 4
Funding
SEC filings, press & company announcements$7M disclosed across 1 round · 2025
- $7MSeedNov 2025 · 2 sources
Wellington Management (lead), Y Combinator (lead), Pelion Venture Partners, Rebel Fund
Source ↗
Source: company announcements and press reports — follow each round's link for the claim.
The YC application· Spring 2025 batch
Alumni Q&A
- How did your company get started? (i.e., How did the founders meet? How did you come up with the idea? How did you decide to be a founder?)
- Cactus was founded by Ajith Govind and Avinash Joshi, both of whom had previously gone through Y Combinator. After working with hundreds of small business owners, they observed that administrative work was preventing service providers from growing, and built Cactus as an AI copilot to expand a home service company's capacity without adding staff.
Summarized from the founders' answers on their Y Combinator profile.
Images
Founder mafia
2 people who came through Cactus went on to found or lead other companies.
Competitors · 3
by search overlapCaktus8 shared keywordsCaktus AI is an AI-powered academic platform for students, offering 25+ specialized tools including an essay writer with academic citations, a step-by-step math solver, a text humanizer, research and citation finder, and a flashcard/quiz maker. It serves students across subjects, providing subscription-based study aids for writing, math, science, and study material generation.
Cactus Compute8 shared keywordsCactus Compute provides an on-device AI runtime for speech, vision, and text models that automatically routes between on-device and cloud inference based on complexity and audio quality. The platform enables developers to deploy speech transcription, voice assistants, and LLM applications across mobile, desktop, and wearable devices with privacy-first architecture.
Aktus AI's5 shared keywordsAktus deploys AI workers that ingest financial documents and run calculations through a deterministic code layer to produce audit-traceable outputs like waterfalls, K-1s, NAV, and capital accounts. It serves private equity, VC, hedge funds, fund administrators, real asset managers, CPA/tax teams, OCIOs, and insurance carriers with alternative portfolios.
Companies competing with Cactus for the same Google search keywords, organic and paid, via search-intersection analysis.
In the news
Bike MS: Cactus and Crude event this weekend raises funds for multiple sclerosis researchkcbd.com · Jul 2026Frequently asked questions
- What does Cactus do?
- Cactus automates lead response and customer re-engagement for home service businesses, ensuring calls are answered within 60 seconds and dormant CRM contacts are converted into repeat bookings.
- Who founded Cactus?
- Cactus was founded by Ajith Govind, Avinash Joshi in 2024.
- Who are Cactus's investors?
- Cactus's investors include Y Combinator, Pelion Venture Partners, Rebel Fund, Wellington Management.
- How much funding has Cactus raised?
- Cactus has disclosed $7M raised across 1 round.
- Where is Cactus headquartered?
- Cactus is headquartered in San Francisco, US.