Airship wants to build better sales tools for HVAC contractors

The HVAC industry is going through a transformation. The old guard of tradespeople are on the cusp of retiring while private equity firms are consolidating the industry. Airship is building a software solution for HVAC's next chapter.

Airship is building a point-of-sale software for HVAC contractors to give them the knowledge they need, on things like incentive programs for energy-efficient heat pumps to rebates their customers would be eligible for, to help them close larger sales. Craig Battin, Airship's co–founder and CEO, said the software is meant to be intuitive and easy to adopt, as many potential HVAC contractors have yet to adopt technology at all and are still relying on pen and paper to conduct their business.

Battin said that despite the industry's low-level of tech adoption, Airship looks to build an enterprise-grade solution, which sets the company up well to sell to the growing number of private equity-backed HVAC rollups.

"Private equity entering the space, that is the tip of the spear," Battin said. "It is in the very early innings of software adoption. Where we started now sets us up to continue building products. We have the benefit of the ground under this space shifting constantly."

Airship co-founder and executive chairman, Michael Sachse, told TechCrunch that a lot of HVAC companies are focused on getting more calls to drive up business. He thinks a better use of their time is trying to increase the ticket sizes on the business they already have. He added that thus far the average Airship user has been able to increase their ticket size by 20%.

Sachse said that he got the idea for Airship while he was working as the CEO of Dandelion Energy, a residential geothermal heating and cooling startup. Sachse said this role sent him down the rabbit hole as to why heat pump adoption was so challenging.

"I started to think about it more and it became very clear everything was about the home contractor and building tools and I had some firsthand experience about how that was limited," Sachse said.

Sachse mentioned his idea to early-stage fintech firm QED last year which introduced him to Battin, who had years of startup operating experience and was looking for his next project. The two started building Airship last fall. The company currently has 10 design partners and is operating in beta. They are planning on an initial launch in November before rolling out more widely early next year.

Now, the company is emerging from stealth, announcing a partnership with service software unicorn ServiceTitan, and just raised a $4 million pre-seed round. The funding round was led by QED with participation from Silence, Lorimer Ventures, Four Acres Capital and Twine Ventures.

Airship plans to use the capital to hire and continue to build out its product. Battin said that this point of sale software is just the first building block to an eventual platform company that also helps HVAC contractors in areas like payments and managing warranties and subscriptions, among others.

There are numerous other companies looking to build tech for HVAC contractors. Airship's new partner ServiceTitan is one of them. The company has raised $1.5 billion in VC funding. Jobber is another that has raised more than $183 million to help HVAC contractors with scheduling and invoices. Service Fusion is another that offers field-management tools and raised $10 million in venture capital before being acquired by EverCommerce in 2020.

Airship thinks it maintains an edge though in this crowded market by focusing on tools contractors can bring into the field to make more money on each sale.

"One of the things I'm excited about is we really like working with these customers," Sachse said. "We get really candid and rapid feedback. They are very interested in making their businesses better. When I look forward to the next couple of years, I'm excited for customers to use this."