Homeowners need a handbook for maintenance, founders say; their app puts to-do’s in the past

Tanuj and Rupal Gupta are taking what they know about preventative care from their medical backgrounds and applying it to homeownership, the husband-and-wife duo shared.

They created Huxedo, a personal home maintenance manager that predicts what a home needs, reminds the homeowner before it gets urgent, books trusted pros, and keeps it all logged to the home’s digital record.

“It’s an electronic maintenance record,” explained Tanuj, who has medical, computer engineering, and finance degrees and worked in healthcare IT, including at Cerner (now Oracle). “The human body is a 100-year-old asset that needs preventive care and acute care and a record that outlasts the physician. This is a long record for a 100-year-old asset — your house — that can pass between owners and that can help you with acute care, preventative care, all of that. So it really is like an EMR.”

“We were really just thinking about ways to apply those kinds of principles to a problem that we didn’t know,” added Rupal, who was a pediatrician at Children’s Mercy. “I’ve been trained in healthcare, not in homes. So how do we try to apply those?”

Leawood-based Huxedo — which soft launched with family and friends this spring — is now being used in 38 states and 232 cities across the country.

Tanuj Gupta, co-founder of Huxedo, chats with Josh Bartels, executive director of Nebraska Angels, during a speed pitching event at Keystone CoLab, organized by Accelerate Venture Partners and Network Kansas/eGrowth Ventures; photo by Nikki Overfelt Chifalu, Startland News

Tanuj pitched the app at the Investor Speed Pitching event Wednesday at Keystone CoLab for the culmination of the seventh cohort of the Accessing Growth Capital Series (AGCS). A nine-week program run by Accelerate Venture Partners and Network Kansas/ eGrowth Ventures, the AGCS effort aimed to help 16 founders from across the Heartland understand what institutional capital really looks like — what it costs, what it unlocks, and whether it’s actually the right path for their business.

RELATED: Speed pitch event accelerates founder funding IQ; venture capital isn’t always the right move, investors say

“I’m surprised how much resources Kansas has for small businesses and startups,” Tanuj noted. “I really feel like we’re punching above our weight in terms of support for startups here.”

‘Huge gap in the market’

Once a homeowner enters their address into Huxedo’s app, it projects a maintenance schedule, the couple noted.

“We are predicting based on your location, age, size of your home, the weather patterns,” Tanuj continued. “For example, I know that if your house is in western Massachusetts, there’s a 90-percent chance you have a septic tank and not a public sewer. So we built that logic in so that within 30 seconds we’ve got maybe 80 percent of what’s in your house.”

“Then we know — from our database of systems and services that we put together — generally what the maintenance, repair, and upgrade schedule or replacement schedule is like,” he added. “So we put you on a system.”

Huxedo then sends reminders when maintenance is due and helps with the next steps, whether that’s suggesting a DIY tutorial or providing bids from local contractors with the hopes of getting homeowners to take a couple meaningful actions each month. Unlike competitors Angi and Thumbtack, Huxedo is not a service marketplace where homeowners are flooded with unwanted calls from contractors, they said. All their information is kept private until a contractor is chosen.

“There’s a huge gap in the market for something that is for the homeowner,” Tanuj explained. “I really believe whoever pays you is your customer. With Angi and Thumbtack, the contractor pays them, so they’re geared toward getting them leads. Or if you use Facebook, advertisers pay Facebook, so they gear their algorithms towards satisfying the advertisers.”

“We said, ‘Look, we should create something that earns the right to be paid for by the homeowner like home security systems or those types of periodic services,’” he continued.

Then like Carfax, Huxedo keeps a record of the work that was done.

“We don’t have anything like that for the home,” Tanuj noted. “Our cars tell us when the oil should be changed, but our homes don’t tell us.”

Rupal Gupta, co-founder of Huxedo; photo courtesy of Huxedo

A catalyst floods in

The Guptas have been talking about an idea for a personal home maintenance manager for years, they shared, especially when they moved to Kansas City, bought a house, were busy with their jobs, and didn’t know anyone here to connect them to trusted professionals. For a while, they relied on the previous owners of their home.

“We were very lucky that this house was very well taken care of before,” Rupal said. “But eventually, you can’t keep reaching out to those people who lived in the house. This is our third purchase, but we’ve always had problems that you find out after the fact. And we’ve always wanted help without having the troubles of it.”

In 2024, they got even more serious about what would become Huxedo with the proliferation of AI, the couple noted, as well as when their basement took on water after there was widespread flooding in their area. They thought their sump pump was working until Rupal went down to the basement to do yoga and stepped on squishy carpet.

“Our basement never floods, never never never,” she explained. “We called many, many places, and nobody had services.”

“Because the flooding hit everybody, we couldn’t get somebody in for weeks,” Tanuj added.

That’s where Huxedo would have been helpful, they noted. Even before the flooding, the app would have given instructions for maintenance of the sump pump, and then if those instructions had been ignored, the concierge system would have been able to connect them to service after the flooding.

“The idea is offloaded to somebody,” Tanuj continued. “‘Hey, concierge, just get us somebody, anybody, figure that problem out while we clean the basement.’”

“So we’re predicting what’s in the home using AI and some statistics,” he added. “And then we’re telling you you know what to do preventatively. But then, if these emergencies happen, you can book through us.”

The concierge is an AI and human team, Tanuj noted.

“It’s a human in the loop, and as we get better with the AI, we’ll automate more,” he explained. “But the idea is, it’s never going to be fully AI. They’ll research the top providers in your area. Since we’re not selling sales leads, we find you the best. We get you comparative quotes.”

The Guptas have learned a lot since their first test of Huxedo in July 2025 and their soft launch earlier this year, they shared. As the app expands into more households across the country, they are hoping to convert users into subscribers and to start partnering with real estate professionals.

“We think another compelling thing is a brand new homeowner, especially young homeowners,” Tanuj continued. “They don’t get a manual that their parents are passing down on how to take care of the house. So put you at closing, just like we do with home warranties, give something like this app so that then the homeowner knows what to do right away.”

“We do have in the app, for example,” he added, “if you’ve just bought your house, the sort of systems or services you think of like cable, Wi-Fi, landscaping, house cleaning, stuff like that.”

‘I don’t really want to do it’

Kansas City-area resident Turner Collins found out how useful the Huxedo app is after his wife used it to schedule some grout work that needed done in one of their showers, he shared.

“She used it to get some honey-do’s around the house done,” he explained. “I’m very busy, running around with kids. I’m president of my neighborhood, too, so I do a lot of community work. And then I’m working two jobs, so there’s a lot going on all the time. During my downtime, I gotta be honest, I’m really looking to outsource anything because I don’t really want to do it.”

For the grout work — which had been on his list for a while — he wasn’t even really sure whether to call a plumber or a handyman, he noted, and then he knew he’d have to look over reviews before choosing one.

“Lo and behold, Maria’s like, ‘I’m getting it done,’” he continued. “They got it done quickly, and where she found little things where she wanted it to be improved, the handyman came right back out.”

That’s when Collins asked her where she found the guy and she told him about Huxedo.

“She showed me and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s really cool,’” he recalled. “It was a nice surprise because I know the founders, but I didn’t know that they had gotten this far. I would highly, highly recommend it just because, at this very busy time of everything going on, just get a few seconds back of your day.”

“The app is well designed and I was really really impressed with the experience and the speed,” he added. “The obvious usefulness is there because it took something off my list, which if it’s gonna outsource to a reputable handyman who can come and get the job done, I’m satisfied, especially if my wife is satisfied.”