Why I'm building this — and why I'm here.

You probably opened this page because something on the rest of the site caught your eye and you want to know who's behind COSai. Fair question. Here's the short answer.

I'm Rico Hinds. For the last decade I've been running businesses — twenty-five-plus of them across two holding companies, SureSwift Capital and Relay Commerce. All SaaS and online businesses. Different industry than yours. But the pain that drove me to build COSai is exactly the pain you've been carrying: the books are always behind, the decisions get made on guesswork, and the cost of being wrong is real money out of your pocket.

Every business I've ever touched had the same problem. Sunday night, the owner doesn't know if last week made money. Tuesday morning, you're bidding a job using last quarter's labor cost because that's all the bookkeeper has on file. The CPA shows up in March with a tax bill that's forty thousand bigger than expected because nobody flagged the equipment spend back in October. The books close on the 25th — by then half of next month has already happened.

I spent years assuming somebody had solved this. Operating businesses. Evaluating companies as acquisition targets. Asking every founder I met. Nobody had. Not the unicorns. Not the $50M companies running NetSuite. Not the well-run shops with the best bookkeepers.

What I figured out is that this isn't a software problem the way most people think. It's not “QuickBooks needs better features.” It's that no system in existence connects your bank, your accounting software, your field service tool, your payroll, and your inbox into a single picture of what's true RIGHT NOW. A human bookkeeper can't do it — too much data, too many systems, not enough hours. Old software can't do it — it was never built to reason across systems. The only thing that can do it is AI that's smart enough to read across your whole stack and act in real time. That technology arrived a few years ago. Nobody has wired it into a product yet. So I'm doing it.

We're starting with the trades — HVAC, plumbing, electrical, commercial mechanical, roofing — because that's where the pain is sharpest. Multi-entity holdings. Variable labor crews. Materials going out the door before you've billed for them. Progress billing on commercial work. Net-90 receivables that strangle your cash flow. If we can run a trades shop's books, we can run any business in America. So that's where we started.

I'll be honest about one thing. I haven't operated an HVAC business. I haven't run a plumbing shop. What I've done is sit across from a few hundred business owners and watch them struggle with the same problem: not having a financial picture they could trust, in time to act on it. Including in my own businesses, including with the best tooling money can buy. So when I built COSai, I built the thing I would have killed for if I'd had it for the last seven years.

We're only accepting ten design partners in 2026. If you're a $1M–$20M trades operator running on Jobber, ServiceTitan, or Housecall Pro, and you're tired of running your business on stale numbers, I want to hear from you. Apply through the link, or just email me directly at rico@cosai.tech. I read every message.

That's the page. An operator building the tool he wished he'd had for seven years, for other operators who have been waiting for someone to build it. If that resonates, let's talk.