CreativeCo invests in ProLine, the vertical AI + SaaS platform for roofing contractors

There are 84 million single family homes in the US. Each one of these homes has a roof, which over time needs repair or replacement. As a result, over 100,000 roofing contractors do over $50 billion in roofing work each year in the US. The work is consistent and stable — bringing more and more professionalism and investment into the trade each year.

Let’s say you’re a roofing contractor doing more than $10M in annual revenue. You have a larger crew with multiple projects running at any time. To grow, you need to keep selling new customers — which in roofing, can require many months. Your focus is on profitability and cash flow, so you need to make sure your proposals are accurate, your team and projects are efficient, and your payments and cash are quick. You need software to run your business, but since roofing has specific requirements — you need software built specifically to run a roofing business.

Like any vertical market today, there are certainly legacy software vendors that have provided these SaaS operating systems over the last 10–20 years. But none of these vendors were born in the age of AI, and generally have the same old approaches to how their systems work.

Back in 2021, AJ Briley teamed up with roofing entrepreneur John Delaurier to build a new type of software solution for the roofing trade — ProLine is “for roofers who want to dominate their market & still make it home for dinner.”

ProLine combines customer phone, text and email communications with AI-enabled automation to help run an entire roofing operation from sales to production to payments on auto-pilot, as the system of record for the business. The solution is awesome and new, and ProLine is growing fast at the expense of legacy players in the space.

We were excited to discover ProLine in 2023 and track its progress into 2024, which turned out to be a big year of growth for the business. Co-founders AJ and John decided that they needed to raise equity capital to keep growing fast, but they did not want to lose their bootstrapped, capital efficient orientation.

We’re excited to announce that CreativeCo Fund III has made a growth equity investment in ProLine.

We love the ProLine team and their vision of building the market-leading solution for roofing. Now is the perfect time to build vertical solutions with AI at the core, and ProLine is moving very quickly in this direction. Our investment will help the team invest further in product, go-to-market and customer success resources.

Moreover, ProLine meets our “metric combo” requirement: it’s growing really fast (4x year over year), but is also super capital efficient (ARR is greater than cumulative cash burn since inception). Our deal is perfect for entrepreneurs like AJ and John that want to raise a growth equity round, but at the same time want to minimize their dilution as they build a profitable, market-leading business.

Team CreativeCo is very excited and appreciative of the opportunity to help AJ, John and the ProLine team achieve their vision. ProLine joins Churnkey (revenue retention automation for subscription businesses) and Swivl (AI automation for self storage operators) in our CreativeCo Fund III portfolio.