The co-founder and CEO of ServiceTitan is recognized for turning a summer project meant to help his own father’s contracting business into the software that now runs the back office for tens of thousands of trade contractors, for taking that company public on the Nasdaq, and for pushing the platform into agentic AI faster than the market expected.
HG HomeClub has named Ara Mahdessian, co-founder and CEO of ServiceTitan, to its list of the 25 Most Influential Leaders in Home Improvement, Home Services and Outdoor Living.
The list, published by HG HomeClub, recognizes 25 leaders who are shaping these three industries in the right way. It spans manufacturing, distribution, retail, technology, franchising, contracting, media, capital and the associations that convene the trades. It is presented alphabetically and carries no numerical ranking, because the leaders on it exercise influence in fundamentally different ways, and comparing a keynote stage to a distribution network, or a franchise system to a product platform, would flatten what makes each of them consequential.
Mahdessian earns his place on it as the executive who replaced the shoebox of receipts and the kitchen-table invoice with the operating system an entire industry now runs on. Under his leadership, ServiceTitan guided the company from a founder-led startup to a Nasdaq-listed public company, crossed $1 billion in annualized revenue run rate in its second fiscal year as a public company, and now powers over 15,000 contracting businesses and more than 100,000 field technicians across plumbing, HVAC, electrical, garage door and other trades.
Those are the numbers. The story is in the kitchen table where it started.
What Did Ara Mahdessian Watch His Parents Go Through Every Night?
Mahdessian was born to an Armenian family and immigrated to the United States as a young boy, eventually settling with his family in Glendale, California. His father worked long days in the field as a residential contractor and long nights back home managing the business. As Mahdessian and his eventual co-founder Vahe Kuzoyan later put it in their own words, their parents routinely spent hours after dinner typing invoices at the kitchen table, processing shoeboxes full of receipts, and calculating timesheets to pay technicians, work that, in Mahdessian’s telling, “never ended.”
Mahdessian attended Stanford University, where he studied management science and computer science, and met his future co-founder Vahe Kuzoyan on a college ski trip, where the two, both Armenian-American sons of immigrant tradesmen, bonded over watching their fathers build businesses from nothing.
How Did a Summer Project Become ServiceTitan?
After graduating, rather than taking a conventional Silicon Valley engineering job, Mahdessian and Kuzoyan went home and started as a project to help automate their fathers’ contracting businesses, work that grew into ServiceTitan, headquartered in Glendale, California. What began as a tool for two family businesses became, in Mahdessian’s words, a way to change the lives of “blue-collar, small business owners” across the entire home services industry.
How Did ServiceTitan Scale From a Family Favor to a Public Company?
ServiceTitan completed its initial public offering on December 12, 2024, listing on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker TTAN. Shares priced at $71 and closed their first day of trading up 42 percent, pushing the company’s market capitalization to nearly $9 billion. In its first full fiscal year as a public company, ServiceTitan reported $961 million in total revenue, up 24 percent year over year, and by early calendar 2026 had surpassed a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate. “I am deeply proud to surpass a $1B annualized revenue run rate and to see our vision unfold faster than we ever could have imagined,” Mahdessian said when the company announced the milestone.
What Is ServiceTitan Betting on Next?
Mahdessian has pushed ServiceTitan aggressively into agentic AI, positioning the platform as what the company calls an “Agentic Operating System for the Trades.” Its AI product, Max, is designed to automate demand generation, call booking, quoting and dispatch alongside human teams rather than replacing them, and by fiscal 2027 ServiceTitan expected to finish the year with more than 700 enrolled Max locations, with early customers seeing call-booking and close-rate improvements of several hundred basis points relative to peers not yet on the platform.
How Does Ara Mahdessian Talk About the People His Company Serves?
Mahdessian consistently frames tradespeople in existential rather than transactional terms. “We depend on the men and women of the trades to maintain our life support systems: running water, heat, air conditioning, and power,” Mahdessian said in a statement tied to one of the company’s funding rounds, a framing he has returned to repeatedly to argue that an industry critical to daily life deserves the same caliber of software as any other sector of the economy.
How Does Ara Mahdessian Give Back to the Contractors He Serves?
Beyond the product itself, Mahdessian has backed ServiceTitan’s Contractor Playbook, a living resource compiling operating methods, marketing tactics and growth strategies from the company’s own team and from top-performing contractors on the platform, intended to help owners across every trade learn from one another rather than solve the same problems in isolation.
What Recognition Has Ara Mahdessian Received?
Mahdessian has been named to the Los Angeles Business Journal’s LA500, the publication’s annual list of the region’s 500 most influential business leaders, in multiple years, including its 2022 edition, as ServiceTitan grew from a private Los Angeles tech success story into one of the most closely watched software IPOs of the mid-2020s.
Why Does Ara Mahdessian Belong Among the 25 Most Influential Leaders in These Industries?
Influence in these industries takes several forms. Some leaders influence through a keynote stage or a book. Some through a franchise system that creates business owners. Some through a distribution network, a software platform, or the price of a pallet.
Ara Mahdessian influences through infrastructure. He did not roll up trade businesses or manufacture the materials contractors install; he built the software that now sits underneath the operations of tens of thousands of them, replacing the kitchen-table paperwork his own father once did by hand. Taking that company public, crossing a billion dollars in annualized revenue, and pushing it into agentic AI while keeping the mission tethered to the people who do the physical work is exactly the kind of quiet, structural influence this list was created to recognize.
About HG HomeClub
HG HomeClub is a national media platform serving the home improvement, home services and outdoor living industries. Created to champion media back to its original purpose of informed transparency, HG HomeClub curates the top stories, headlines, rankings, videos, podcasts, webinars, events and professional recommendations across the industry and presents them in one consolidated, easily consumable destination, helping both homeowners and professionals make better-informed decisions. More information is available at hghomeclub.com.
About ServiceTitan
ServiceTitan, Inc. (Nasdaq: TTAN) is a cloud-based software platform headquartered in Glendale, California, built to power the trades. Founded by Ara Mahdessian and Vahe Kuzoyan, the company provides an end-to-end operating system for contractors spanning scheduling, dispatch, invoicing, payments, marketing and, increasingly, agentic AI, and powers over 15,000 contracting businesses and more than 100,000 field technicians. ServiceTitan completed its initial public offering in December 2024 and reported $961 million in total revenue for fiscal year 2026. More information is available at servicetitan.com.
The 25 Most Influential Leaders in Home Improvement, Home Services and Outdoor Living
Presented alphabetically. There is no numerical ranking; each leader is recognized for influence exercised in a distinct way.
- Doug Black — Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, SiteOne Landscape Supply (Outdoor living)
- AJ Brown — Co-Chief Executive Officer, Apex Service Partners (Platforms)
- Paul Burleson — Senior Account Executive, Westlake Royal Building Products (Home improvement)
- Jenilee Common — Chief Executive Officer, Leaf Home and Erie Home (Home improvement)
- Greg Cummings — Chief Executive Officer, Power100 (Media)
- Bill Darcy — Global President and Chief Executive Officer, NKBA and KBIS (Associations)
- Mike Davis — Chief Executive Officer, Neighborly (Franchising)
- Ted Decker — Chair, President and Chief Executive Officer, The Home Depot (Retail)
- Marvin R. Ellison — Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, Lowe’s (Retail)
- Aaron Erter — Chief Executive Officer, James Hardie (Manufacturing)
- Daniel Gluck — Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Renuity (Home improvement)
- Ken Goodrich — Chairman; Founder, Goettl; The Goodrich Organization (Home services)
- Brian Gottlieb — Best-Selling Author and Speaker, Beyond the Hammer (Speaking and authorship)
- Maggie Hardy — Owner, President and Chief Executive Officer, 84 Lumber (Distribution)
- Brad Jacobs — Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, QXO (Distribution)
- Kurt Kane — President and Chief Executive Officer, TruGreen (Outdoor living)
- Ara Mahdessian — Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, ServiceTitan (Technology)
- Matt Malone — Founder and Executive Chairman, Groundworks (Home services)
- Tommy Mello — Founder and Chief Executive Officer, A1 Garage Door Service (Home services)
- Heidi G. Petz — Chair, President and Chief Executive Officer, Sherwin-Williams (Manufacturing)
- Asher Raphael — Co-Chief Executive Officer, Power Home Remodeling (Home improvement)
- Dave Regnery — Chair and Chief Executive Officer, Trane Technologies (Manufacturing)
- Marcus Sheridan — Founder, Marcus Sheridan International (Speaking and authorship)
- Dan Tinker — President and Chief Executive Officer, SRS Distribution (Distribution)
- James W. Tobin III — President and Chief Executive Officer, National Association of Home Builders (Associations)
Frequently Asked Questions
- What is HG HomeClub, and what is this list?
HG HomeClub is a national media platform serving the home improvement, home services, and outdoor living industries. It was created to return media to its original purpose of informed transparency, curating the industry’s top stories, headlines, rankings, videos, podcasts, webinars, events and professional recommendations in one place for both homeowners and professionals. The 25 Most Influential Leaders in Home Improvement, Home Services and Outdoor Living is one of HG HomeClub’s editorial rankings, recognizing the people shaping these industries in the right way across manufacturing, distribution, retail, technology, franchising, contracting, media, capital and the associations that convene the trades.
- Is the list ranked from one to 25?
No. The list is presented alphabetically and carries no numerical order. The leaders recognized exercise influence in genuinely different ways, through enterprise scale, growth, product innovation, franchising, capital, authorship, keynote stages, advocacy and media, and HG HomeClub declined to impose a hierarchy on work that is not comparable. Every leader on the list is recognized equally.
- Who is Ara Mahdessian?
Ara Mahdessian is co-founder and CEO of ServiceTitan, a cloud-based software platform that powers the trades, headquartered in Glendale, California. Born to an Armenian immigrant family, he grew up watching his father run a residential contracting business and attended Stanford University, where he studied management science and computer science. He co-founded ServiceTitan with Vahe Kuzoyan after the two met on a college ski trip and bonded over their shared experience as sons of immigrant tradesmen.
- Why was Ara Mahdessian selected for this list?
Because he co-founded and continues to lead ServiceTitan, which he and Kuzoyan grew from a project meant to help their own fathers’ businesses into the operating system for tens of thousands of trade contractors, took the company public on the Nasdaq in December 2024, and has surpassed $1 billion in annualized revenue run rate while pushing the platform aggressively into agentic AI.
- When did ServiceTitan go public, and how has the stock performed since?
ServiceTitan completed its initial public offering on December 12, 2024, listing on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker TTAN at $71 per share. Shares closed their first day of trading up 42 percent, valuing the company at nearly $9 billion. In fiscal year 2026, the company reported $961 million in total revenue, up 24 percent year over year, and surpassed a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate in early calendar 2026.
- How many contractors and technicians does ServiceTitan serve?
ServiceTitan powers over 15,000 contracting businesses and more than 100,000 field technicians worldwide, across trades including plumbing, HVAC, electrical and garage door services.
- What is ServiceTitan’s AI strategy?
ServiceTitan describes its platform as an Agentic Operating System for the Trades. Its AI product, Max, automates workflows such as demand generation, call booking, quoting and dispatch, working alongside human teams rather than replacing them. The company has reported call-booking and close-rate improvements for businesses using Max relative to peers not yet on the platform, and has continued expanding the number of enrolled Max locations quarter over quarter.
- What is the origin story of ServiceTitan?
Mahdessian and Kuzoyan, both sons of Armenian immigrant tradesmen, began ServiceTitan as a project to help automate their own fathers’ contracting businesses, which relied on manual, paper-based processes for invoicing, scheduling and timesheets. That project grew into ServiceTitan, now headquartered in Glendale, California, and serving thousands of contracting businesses across the country and internationally.
- What recognition has Ara Mahdessian received?
Mahdessian has been named to the Los Angeles Business Journal’s LA500, its annual list of the region’s 500 most influential business leaders, in multiple years as ServiceTitan grew from a private Los Angeles technology success story into a publicly traded company.
