The home is the last building software forgot.

An honest founder note from Diego Salazar — not a “from idea to unicorn” arc. Why the home-services category was the one to build for, why now, and what we owe the operators paying us $349 a month.

It was a Sunday in March, and my mom was crying over a QuickBooks export.

My mom runs a six-truck plumbing shop in Corpus Christi — Salazar Plumbing, the one her dad started in 1981. She’s the dispatcher, the biller, the HR department, and the person who returns angry voicemails on Saturdays. That Sunday in March 2024, she called me about a payroll spreadsheet that wouldn’t reconcile. Three of her techs had hours that didn’t match the dispatch board. The board didn’t match the invoices. The invoices didn’t match QuickBooks. She’d been at it since 2 PM. It was 9.

I was in San Francisco at the time, working as a PM at Plaid. I’d built financial APIs for fintech startups. I had no idea my own family’s business was running on three different tools, two paper notebooks, and the contents of my mother’s head. I asked her what software she used. “ServiceTitan.” What about it? “It’s $1,800 a month and it doesn’t talk to QuickBooks and the AI feature is another four hundred.”

Every venture pitch in 2024 was “AI for lawyers” or “AI for radiologists.” Nobody was building for my mom.

I flew to Corpus Christi the next weekend. I sat in her office for three days. I rode along with two of her techs. I watched her dispatcher, Carmen, hold an eight-truck schedule together with the help of a whiteboard, a printed map, and the kind of memory that doesn’t transfer when someone quits. I had built financial software for billion-dollar companies. I had never seen software work this badly for a real business.

I started looking at the category. $1.4 trillion in annual U.S. spend. Roughly 700,000 trades shops and 30,000 home-health agencies. The platforms serving them — ServiceTitan, Jobber, Housecall Pro, AxisCare, HHAeXchange — were all built before LLMs existed and were bolting AI on as $400/month upcharges. They charged per user, which punished the exact growth they claimed to enable. They were structurally adversarial: the more your business worked, the more they cost.

I called my friend Anika Rao — she’d run engineering at a payments company that served home-health agencies. We sketched it on a napkin in May 2024: one record for a home, one platform for everyone who shows up there, one flat price, AI included by default. We named it Veladoma — to keep watch over the home — and started writing code in June.

If you’re paying us $349 a month, you should be able to call us by name.

Eleven of our 32 people came up in the trades or in home care. Carmen — my mom’s dispatcher — runs our customer-success team. We hire former owners, former biller-leads, former caregivers, before we hire MBAs. When you call support, the person who picks up has either dispatched a truck or closed an EVV claim. We think that’s not a luxury — it’s the bar.

My mom is customer #1. Salazar Plumbing has been on Veladoma since the day we shipped the dispatch board, and her invoices clear in seven minutes. Carmen took her first real vacation in twelve years last August. Those two facts are the only metrics that matter to me.