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Company profile · 3 min read

Cohesive: Prospecting and follow-up for local service businesses

Cohesive finds local prospects, runs email/SMS/phone outreach, follows up and manages the pipeline for blue-collar service businesses.

Cohesive is an agentic CRM for blue-collar service businesses selling into local markets. It fits a cleaning, landscaping, HVAC, pest-control, roofing or similar company whose owners are in the field and need prospecting, outreach and follow-up to keep running without a full sales team.

What it does

Cohesive’s current homepage organizes the product around four growth motions: find local businesses and property owners, reach them across email/phone/SMS, follow up on replies and missed calls, and manage interested leads, booked calls and performance in one command center. The platform is designed around messy local markets that are poorly represented in traditional B2B databases.

The important buyer decision is whether the service business needs a system for finding demand, not simply a CRM for tracking leads it already has. Cohesive’s API docs expose campaign, inbox, conversation, reply and forward endpoints, which makes the product more usable as an operating layer or white-label workflow. The company also publishes a DNC-list control in the current interface and compliance-focused content in its blog; outbound permission and local law remain the customer’s responsibility.

The homepage reports 1,000-plus service businesses, 220K-plus conversations and three channels. The YC launch described more than 350 commercial cleaning, landscaping and pest-control owners. These are company-published operating claims, not independent measurements of revenue or deliverability.

Founder context and tradeoffs

The YC profile identifies Kevin Zhang and Nam Nguyen as founders. Kevin’s public background includes a prior service business, Charthop and McKinsey work with service franchises; Nam’s includes Microsoft ML engineering and founding engineering at Starlight. That is unusually direct experience with both the operator and software sides of the problem.

Pricing is not public. A buyer should ask how lists are sourced and refreshed, how opt-outs and DNC rules are enforced, how messages are approved and what happens when the agent receives a sensitive or ambiguous reply. The system can create more conversations; the owner still needs the capacity to serve the work it generates.

Editorial take

I would shortlist Cohesive for a local service company with a clear service area, a repeatable offer and an owner who cannot spend every day prospecting. Start with one vertical and one campaign, then judge qualified conversations and booked work—not send volume.

Quick facts

FieldSourced detail
ProductAgentic prospecting, outreach, follow-up and CRM for local services
BuyersCommercial cleaning, HVAC, landscaping, pest-control and adjacent businesses
ChannelsEmail, SMS and phone; API endpoints publicly documented
Public claims1,000-plus businesses and 220K-plus conversations, company-reported
PricingNot publicly listed

Sources checked

SourceChecked
YC profile2026-09-19
Cohesive homepage2026-09-19
Cohesive API docs2026-09-19
Cohesive launch2026-09-19

Cohort context

Cohesive is listed in Spring 2025. In our 2026-09-18 directory snapshot, 97 of 143 listed companies in that cohort have YC’s primary industry label B2B (67.8%). This is a current-directory comparison, not an original intake count or a performance ranking. Nine-cohort dataset.

Public website snapshot

Observed 2026-09-19 16:15 UTC in raw homepage HTML. This records visible metadata and advertised links, not agent execution or product quality.

SignalHomepage observation
Product description metadataObserved
Canonical linkNot observed in this response
H1 or H2 headingObserved
Typed structured dataNot observed in this response
Docs/developer linkObserved
Pricing linkNot observed in this response
llms.txt linkNot observed in this response
Markdown alternateNot observed in this response

Public observations · Collection method. Missing links here do not establish that a capability or file is absent elsewhere.

Ali Abouelatta

About the author

Cofounder of Lazyweb (a16z Speedrun). Previously grew subscriptions and built native ads at Duolingo. Writes First1000 (90,000+ subscribers).

I cofound Lazyweb, which publishes this site. This is an owner-written publication, not an independent testing organization. Research notes distinguish observations, sourced reporting and editorial judgment.

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