Rebar, a startup building an AI operating system for commercial HVAC suppliers, has raised $14 million in a Series A funding round, it tells Crunchbase News exclusively.
Prudence led the financing for the New York-based company. Zero Infinity Partners, Founder Collective, Villain Capital and Optimist Ventures also participated in the round.
Founded in October 2024, Rebar says it uses artificial intelligence to help commercial HVAC suppliers generate quotes on average 60% to 70% faster than traditional methods. Its proprietary computer vision models analyze construction blueprints and identify, categorize and count all HVAC equipment to produce a bill of materials and generate a quote, according to the company.
Rebar’s focus on the HVAC industry is intentional.
“Most companies either concentrate on other trades or try to cover all of them at once, which ultimately means they serve none particularly well,” CEO and co-founder Evan Brown told Crunchbase News. “Rebar takes the opposite approach. Our AI is trained on millions of HVAC blueprints and mirrors the workflows real estimators use when building a quote.”
Rebar doubled its annual recurring revenue in the first six weeks of 2026, according to Brown, thanks to dozens of new customers using the platform. It operates on a usage-based subscription model.
“If you’re able to increase your volume and build more proposals, the opportunity to win projects goes higher,” Brown explained. “On average, the companies that are using us [would] win around 5% to 10% of the proposals that they created, and those proposals could take up to a week to create before using Rebar.”
He noted that, while it’s still early and construction contracts often take years to finalize, initial conversations with customers suggest win rates may be increasing by roughly 2x to 3x using the new tool.
That same process can take minutes, according to Brown.
Today, Rebar has 40 clients, and notably, seven of them are investors in the startup.
While Rebar’s first product is AI quoting for HVAC suppliers, Brown said the startup plans to expand its product capabilities to plumbing and electrical equipment suppliers through additional agents.
Firsthand industry perspective
Brown’s interest in the HVAC industry stems from summers working with his uncle, the owner of a large HVAC commercial distributor. He then ended up working as an estimator and sales engineer at Johnson Barrow/DMG Corp., where he partnered with contractors, engineers and manufacturers to design, sell and support customized HVAC systems.
“I spent over five years in the space focused on designing and selling HVAC equipment and doing the manual process that we’re solving at Rebar many times,” he recalled. “I’ve looked and built inventory lists off of a plan set by printing out blueprints, highlighters and rulers. I’ve used PDF editors. I’ve really used everything, and I never thought I would end up in tech, nor start a tech company.”
When that company was acquired and became part of Ambient Enterprises, Brown had the opportunity to explore the application of AI in day-to-day operations.
Eventually, he decided to branch out and founded Rebar along with Andrew Schwartz.
What investors are looking for
Jordan Viniar, a partner on Prudence’s investment team, told Crunchbase News that Brown’s education in mechanical engineering combined with his experience working in the HVAC industry give him a “unique,” firsthand perspective.
Prudence is always looking for companies that leverage unique technology to automate historically manual processes, according to Viniar, often in industries where needs have never been addressed by purpose-built software.
“Rebar fits the bill perfectly — HVAC, plumbing, and electrical are large but historically overlooked industries with dozens of manual workflows, none of which could be automated without AI,” he wrote via email. “For the first time, Rebar is delivering tools to their customers that, in many cases, are compressing the time to complete manual tasks by over 90%, leading to greater efficiency, lower costs, and more revenue.”
Venture investment in real estate-related startups has rebounded in recent years after plunging from the pandemic peak. In 2025, startups in the sector pulled in approximately $10.5 billion in seed- through growth-stage financing globally, per Crunchbase data. That’s up about 17% from $9 billion in 2024, with much of the recent investment going to startups that promise greater ROI through the use of automation or AI.
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
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