Rev.io Doesn’t Fear Claude Code. It Loves It.
Claude Code and tools like it, that is, because they helped a one-time billing software maker build a complete managed services tool stack from scratch in two years.
When it comes to AI coding agents, one person’s nemesis can be another one’s savior.
Just ask Rev.io. The same AI coding tools striking fear into the hearts of many SaaS vendors enabled Rev.io to build a multi-function managed services platform pretty much from scratch in about two years.
“That’s not easy to do when you have a fixed budget,” observes Evan Rice (pictured), Rev.io’s president and COO. “We were forced to really embrace these technologies and push the capabilities of what they’re able to do.”
Which have grown exponentially, he continues. “Two years ago, the vast majority of code was written by our engineers with some assistance from these AI tools,” Rice says. Now agents do 90% of that work.
“It’s overseen by our engineers, but they’re not actually writing code themselves anymore,” Rice says.
Rev.io needed that kind of speed and efficiency to keep its private equity owner, Primus Capital, happy about growth and profits while executing a strategic pivot away from its roots as a maker of billing software for telco service providers.
“We had just seen over the years that it was more and more managed service providers that were using our platform,” Rice explains, even as the communication service providers it had served in the past were adding managed IT offerings. Both sets of users wanted Rev.io’s billing software to integrate with leading PSA systems, even though neither group was terribly enthusiastic about those systems.
“We got feedback from our clients that they didn’t love those platforms,” Rice says.
So Rev.io decided to build one of its own. To jumpstart that process, the company bought Tigerpaw, a PSA vendor with nearly 40 years of experience serving both telco and IT partners, back in 2023. Then, with a lot of help from AI, it began rewriting Tigerpaw’s aging code base more or less completely. The upshot of that work, introduced last September, is an integrated line-of-business suite combining billing, PSA, RMM, and digital payments functionality.
“We have all four legs of the stool for a communications provider that has managed services or an IT MSP that’s offering VoIP, data, mobile, or connectivity,” Rice says.
They also have a voice mode AI assistant named Rev.ii that users can ask for help with opening tickets, tracking time, completing quotes, and more. The next step, in development now, is to add long-run agents capable of automating entire workflows start to finish autonomously.
“When we built our original platform, we wanted to have the best tools for our clients’ employees to leverage. Now we want our platform to be an employee,” Rice says. “That’s really a shift that we’re seeing in software in general, and that’s going to be our big differentiator.”
Unlike flesh-and-blood employees, moreover, Rev.io’s agentic laborers will get paid only when they close a ticket or sale. “Today we sell seats like a lot of other software companies,” Rice says. “I fully expect that by the end of this year the vast majority of our pricing will be outcome-based.”
Users won’t have to wait that long for the first of Rev.io’s agents to appear, however. “It’s months out,” Rice says. “We’ll have major releases in April and June and then every two months after that, with small incremental releases that happen every week along the way.”
Or maybe not so incremental and even more often, if AI coding tools keep improving at the rate they have been, he adds. “It’s been pretty fun to watch.”
Into AI and managed services?
Then you’ll probably be into MSP Chat, the podcast I co-host, too. Recent guests include the CEO of that AI system of record startup I wrote about recently, two top executives from AI system of action vendor Thread, and the CEO of ConnectWise, the managed services heavyweight that recently bought AI startup zofiQ. Tune in weekly for even more.
