Toma’s AI voice agents have taken off at car dealerships – and attracted funding from a16z

When Monik Pamecha co-founded AI voice startup Toma in early 2024, he hadn’t anticipated spending the summer time months sweating in Bible Belt automotive dealerships. He and co-founder Anthony Krivonos have been nonetheless centered on banking and healthcare prospects when the sellers got here knocking. 

“They simply referred to 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 take a look at: They determined to have their voice agent name primarily each automotive 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 type of fashionable reinterpretation of the film Tommy Boy, they got down to tour a dozen automotive dealerships in Oklahoma and Mississippi to get a greater understanding of how these companies work. They obtained their fingers soiled each figuratively and actually; Pamecha mentioned his spouse was stunned by the grease stains on his garments when he returned dwelling. 

That dedication paid off. Not solely did they win prospects, they obtained the sellers’ full appeal offensive. The founders shared home-cooked meals – a generally awkward-but-funny affair given Pamecha’s vegetarianism, he mentioned – and have been invited to tour the Corvette Museum. At the very least one seller even requested the Toma founders to tag alongside to a taking pictures vary.

Seema Amble, a accomplice 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 numerous the next-generation of vertical AI firms, numerous the most effective founders have simply lived and breathed with these prospects to grasp what’s occurring underneath the hood,” she informed TechCrunch. “No pun meant.” 

The insights from that journey helped Pamecha and Krivonos sharpen the Toma voice agent right into a software that’s already in use at greater than 100 dealerships across the nation. The AI helps prospects 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 trade influencer Yossi Levi, also referred to as the Automotive Dealership Man.

Levi informed TechCrunch that dealerships wrestle with telephone calls partially as a result of it’s onerous 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 “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 every week or two to present the AI some context. That is necessary as a result of whereas dealerships broadly do the identical issues, there may be numerous 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 staff if and when it will get stumped. These handoff calls get analyzed, too, so as 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 components of a dealership’s operations, these sellers should pay up for these additional 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 couple of weeks. Earlier than that, it was nonetheless largely Pamecha and Krivonos hustling like they did throughout the nation final summer time. 

With out that journey, although, Pamecha mentioned he’s undecided Toma would have reached this level.

“It has been among the best experiences of my life,” he mentioned. “I really feel like we’ve all turn into 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.”