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 had been nonetheless centered on banking and healthcare prospects when the sellers got here knocking.
“They simply known as us up and mentioned ‘we’re drowning in telephone calls,’” Pamecha described that preliminary contact in an interview with TechCrunch.
Seeing a chance to pivot right into a far less-regulated house than banking or healthcare, Pamecha and Krivonos arrange a check: 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 had been solely picked up 45% of the time.
The co-founders packed their luggage. And like some kind of trendy 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 received their arms soiled each figuratively and actually; Pamecha mentioned his spouse was stunned by the grease stains on his garments when he returned house.
That dedication paid off. Not solely did they win prospects, they received the sellers’ full allure offensive. The founders shared home-cooked meals – a generally awkward-but-funny affair given Pamecha’s vegetarianism, he mentioned – and had been invited to tour the Corvette Museum. Not less than one seller even requested the Toma founders to tag alongside to a taking pictures vary.
Seema Amble, a companion at a16z who led the $17 million that Toma has raised so far, mentioned the pair had been “successfully dwelling at these dealerships, going to those sellers’ household barbecues, actually understanding how they function.”
“We spend money on a variety of the next-generation of vertical AI corporations, a variety of the perfect founders have simply lived and breathed with these prospects to grasp what’s happening below the hood,” she informed TechCrunch. “No pun supposed.”
The insights from that journey helped Pamecha and Krivonos sharpen the Toma voice agent right into a device that’s already in use at greater than 100 dealerships across the nation. The AI helps prospects schedule service appointments, deal with elements 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 trade influencer Yossi Levi, also referred to as the Automotive Dealership Man.
Levi informed TechCrunch that dealerships wrestle with telephone calls partly as a result of it’s exhausting to foretell quantity.
“It ebbs and flows. Generally 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 straightforward factor to do,” Levi mentioned. AI has “supplied a chance for sellers to actually 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 per week or two to provide the AI some context. That is essential as a result of whereas dealerships broadly do the identical issues, there could be a variety of variance within the particulars. Some sellers may service extra diesel engines, for instance. Dealerships additionally run numerous customized promotions for each gross sales and repair.
After that preliminary burst of coaching, the Toma AI begins taking calls, handing off to human staff if and when it will get stumped. These handoff calls get analyzed, too, with a view to reinforce the AI mannequin to higher assist that particular dealership. On the enterprise aspect, Toma operates a subscription mannequin. Because the AI brokers can deal with extra elements of a dealership’s operations, these sellers should pay up for these further capabilities.
The Collection A “comes at a good time” for Toma, based on Pamecha. The startup solely employed its first true gross sales worker inside the previous couple of 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 undecided Toma would have reached this level.
“It has been probably the greatest experiences of my life,” he mentioned. “I really feel like we’ve all turn out to be pals, 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.”