When Monik Pamecha co-founded AI voice startup Toma in early 2024, he hadn’t anticipated spending the summer season months sweating in Bible Belt automobile dealerships. He and co-founder Anthony Krivonos have been nonetheless centered on banking and healthcare clients when the sellers got here knocking.
“They only known as us up and mentioned ‘we’re drowning in cellphone calls,’” Pamecha described that preliminary contact in an interview with TechCrunch.
Seeing a possibility to pivot right into a far less-regulated area than banking or healthcare, Pamecha and Krivonos arrange a take a look at: They determined to have their voice agent name basically each automobile dealership within the nation a number of instances. Over the span of some weeks they discovered these calls have been solely picked up 45% of the time.
The co-founders packed their baggage. And like some kind of fashionable reinterpretation of the film Tommy Boy, they got down to tour a dozen automobile dealerships in Oklahoma and Mississippi to get a greater understanding of how these companies work. They bought their palms soiled each figuratively and actually; Pamecha mentioned his spouse was shocked by the grease stains on his garments when he returned house.
That dedication paid off. Not solely did they win clients, they bought the sellers’ full attraction offensive. The founders shared home-cooked meals – a typically awkward-but-funny affair given Pamecha’s vegetarianism, he mentioned – and have been invited to tour the Corvette Museum. No less than one vendor even requested the Toma founders to tag alongside to a taking pictures vary.
Seema Amble, a associate at a16z who led the $17 million that Toma has raised up to now, mentioned the pair have been “successfully residing at these dealerships, going to those sellers’ household barbecues, actually understanding how they function.”
“We put money into a number of the next-generation of vertical AI firms, a number of one of the best founders have simply lived and breathed with these clients to grasp what’s happening below the hood,” she instructed TechCrunch. “No pun supposed.”
The insights from that journey helped Pamecha and Krivonos sharpen the Toma voice agent right into a instrument that’s already in use at greater than 100 dealerships across the nation. The AI helps clients schedule service appointments, deal with components orders, reply gross sales questions, and extra.
Together with a16z, Pamecha and Krivonos attracted funding from Y Combinator (they created Toma at YC in January 2024), the Scale Angels fund, and auto business influencer Yossi Levi, also called the Automobile Dealership Man.
Levi instructed TechCrunch that dealerships battle with cellphone calls partly as a result of it’s arduous to foretell quantity.
“It ebbs and flows. Typically you’re overwhelmed with demand. Different instances there’s not sufficient demand, and matching staffing and correctly coaching that workers for a constant expertise is simply not a simple factor to do,” Levi mentioned. AI has “offered a possibility for sellers to essentially standardize that course of, and ship a richer buyer expertise that’s constant.”
Pamecha mentioned Toma’s onboarding course of includes coaching on a sellers’ buyer requires every week or two to provide the AI some context. That is essential as a result of whereas dealerships broadly do the identical issues, there will be a number of variance within the particulars. Some sellers may service extra diesel engines, for instance. Dealerships additionally run plenty of customized promotions for each gross sales and repair.
After that preliminary burst of coaching, the Toma AI begins taking calls, handing off to human workers if and when it will get stumped. These handoff calls get analyzed, too, in an effort to reinforce the AI mannequin to raised assist that particular dealership. On the enterprise facet, Toma operates a subscription mannequin. Because the AI brokers can deal with extra components of a dealership’s operations, these sellers should pay up for these further capabilities.
The Sequence A “comes at a good time” for Toma, based on Pamecha. The startup solely employed its first true gross sales worker inside the previous few weeks. Earlier than that, it was nonetheless largely Pamecha and Krivonos hustling like they did throughout the nation final summer season.
With out that journey, although, Pamecha mentioned he’s unsure Toma would have reached this level.
“It has been the most effective experiences of my life,” he mentioned. “I really feel like we’ve all turn out to be buddies, and I believe all of it comes from a spot of like, feeling their ache. I believe they see that we really feel the ache, too.”
{content material}
Supply: {feed_title}
