Investment Notes: Elyos

We're thrilled to announce that Blackbird has led the Series A round into Elyos, alongside PiLabs, YC and 468 Capital. Elyos is building AI-powered voice agents that transform call centre chaos in the trades and field services sector into new revenue and radically better customer experiences.

The problem

If you've ever called a plumber, electrician, or HVAC company, you know the drill. You're put on hold. Or nobody picks up at all. Or the person who answers can't actually book you in because they're juggling three other calls and a paper diary. Traditional call centres in trades and field services are challenging environments plagued by missed calls, grumpy service agents, and lost bookings. Staff are hard to hire and retain. Seasonality creates capacity issues. For businesses that live and die by the phone, it's a surprisingly broken experience.

The trades and field services market is enormous and still runs on phone calls, spreadsheets, and clunky software. But it doesn't have to.

Enter Elyos

Elyos builds voice agents that answer the phone, handle customer bookings, chase payments, dispatch engineers, and manage scheduling changes. Customers have replaced entire human call centres with Elyos's agents reducing no-shows, boosting conversion, and seeing clear, measurable ROI. The product is deeply integrated with vertical CRMs like Simpro, allowing agents to drive action seamlessly inside existing business workflows.

Elyos's agents are available 24/7, never put customers on hold, and never lose their cool. They encode the "business logic" unique to every field service company, building trust and delivering value that customers instantly feel.

The team

Elyos's founding trio - Adrian Johnston (Co-CEO), Pip Brown (Co-CEO), and Panos Stravopodis (CTO) - combine high achievement with relentless speed.

Adrian holds a Maths Masters from Oxford, traded at Goldman Sachs, and scaled UNA Brands to $70M ARR before bringing that ambition to Elyos. Pip, started her career with Rolls-Royce and OVO (where she led a field services team of 100+), is a force in sales, personally driving all of Elyos's ARR. Panos, ex-VP of Engineering at Bulb Energy, leads a world-class engineering team.

What stands out about this team is their customer obsession. Every member of the team, every week, spends time in person with customers. When paired with world-class product velocity, Elyos has a real chance at separating themselves from the pack.

Traction

In less than 10 months since relaunch, Elyos closed >15+ customers with 0% churn and a 95% customer satisfaction score. 

Importantly they have raving fans like Tejas from Amax, Fire and Security who said “Before using Elyos, one of the biggest issues was the number of calls that were coming through. Elyos AI agents now handle 30% of technical calls with no human intervention. We’re now in a situation where we can’t imagine not working with Elyos.”

Why now

The trades and field services market is ripe for disruption.The ambition is clear: compress operations teams from hundreds of people to a handful, freeing trades businesses to grow by focusing on what they do best.

We couldn't be more excited to back Adrian, Pip, and Panos on this journey.

— James and Tris, on behalf of Blackbird

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