I’m delighted to share that just three years after our inception-stage investment, 1984 Ventures portfolio company Revv has been acquired in a nine-figure transaction, merging with AirPro Diagnostics to create the automotive industry’s leading ADAS platform.
How it started
Revv’s origin story is a remarkable one. In March 2023, I got a cold email from the founders, Adi (a PM from Misfits Market) and Rashmi (an engineer from Microsoft and Pinterest) about a hair-on-fire problem they had uncovered in the automotive industry.
They had spent a few months visiting auto shops and found that while cars had evolved into computers on wheels, full of sensors and software, car repair had barely changed. Technicians were often neglecting to recalibrate critical sensors - like lane-change assist and reverse cameras - because determining the right procedure meant navigating hundreds of thousands of permutations and hours of research. Adi paints the picture below.
Bear in mind, this was early 2023, just months after the launch of ChatGPT and when AI was the furthest thing from an auto shop owner’s mind. Adi and Rashmi realized sensor calibration was well-suited to AI and built a product that automated the painful research technicians weren’t doing.
We led Revv’s inception round in March 2023, pre-product but post-insight. From there, it was a near instant rocketship: growing from 0 to $10M ARR in its first two years and became one of the first vertical AI success stories of this era.
Why we invested
It’s easy to paint a revisionist story about rocketship growth. But very few companies have strong product-market-fit from the beginning. We didn’t back Revv because we were experts on the market; we backed it because the founders’ strengths were undeniable. Adi and Rashmi had extraordinary grit and hustle, which was evident from their 9-9-7 work ethic and how quickly they became experts in an unfamiliar industry. They were relentlessly customer centric. Between them, they could sell and build, which allowed them to constantly iterate. And most importantly, they had uncovered a genuine insight about the world that no one else knew.
Insight and execution is a killer combo.
Lessons for vertical AI founders
Revv is hugely instructive for every founder building in vertical AI. It shows that some of the best opportunities can exist in sectors that were historically allergic to buying software. In these industries, work is often still done through phone calls, PDFs, spreadsheets and hours of manual research. The key shift is that AI doesn't have to compete for an existing software budget. If the product automates work that was previously performed manually - or enables work that wasn't getting done at all - it can pay for itself out of the value it creates.
Revv also demonstrates what has since become one of our core beliefs about vertical AI: the best products don't just save their customers time, they make them money. (Revv enabled body shops to monetize sensor calibrations that were covered by insurance). With this approach, previously unloved software markets became fertile, often with the added benefit of weaker incumbents. It’s a playbook our founders are applying today across other sectors like commercial real estate, insurance and home services.
The future of Revv
What makes this merger particularly exciting is how complementary the two companies are. Revv has built the intelligence layer for modern vehicle repair: understanding a vehicle, predicting the calibrations required, and helping shops scope the work correctly. AirPro brings a decade of execution experience and data from millions of real-world repairs, diagnostics and calibrations. Together, they create a powerful feedback loop: Revv can predict what should happen based on OEM procedures, see what actually happens when the work is performed, and use that data to make the system increasingly intelligent.
In many ways, it's the natural evolution of the vertical AI playbook we saw from the beginning: automate a painful task, own the workflow, build a proprietary data asset, then connect intelligence directly to execution. The result has the potential to become the connective tissue for an increasingly complex automotive repair industry.
It's remarkable that only three years ago, this started with a cold email from two outsiders who had spent months walking around auto shops trying to understand an overlooked problem. We’re grateful to Adi and Rashmi for letting us be part of the journey from the beginning, and even more excited to see what they build from here.