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

Summary

When Monik Pamecha co-founded AI voice startup Toma in early 2024, he hadn’t anticipated spending the summer months sweating in Bible Belt car dealerships. He and co-founder Anthony Krivonos were still focused on banking and healthcare customers when the dealers came knocking. “They just called us up and said ‘we are drowning in phone calls,’” Pamecha described that initial contact in an interview with TechCrunch. Seeing an opportunity to pivot into a far less-regulated space than banking or healthcare, Pamecha and Krivonos set up a test: They decided to have their voice agent call essentially every car dealership in the country multiple times. Over the span of a few weeks they found those calls were only picked up 45% of the time. The co-founders packed their bags. And like some sort of modern reinterpretation of the movie Tommy Boy, they set out to tour a dozen car dealerships in Oklahoma and Mississippi to get a better understanding of how these businesses work. They got their hands dirty both figuratively and literally; Pamecha said his wife was surprised by the grease stains on his clothes when he returned home. That commitment paid off. Not only did they win customers, they got the dealers’ full charm offensive. The founders shared home-cooked meals – a sometimes awkward-but-funny affair given Pamecha’s vegetarianism, he said – and were invited to tour the Corvette Museum. At least one dealer even asked the Toma founders to tag along to a shooting range. Seema Amble, a partner at a16z who led the $17 million that Toma has raised to date, said the pair were “effectively living at these dealerships, going to these dealers’ family barbecues, really understanding how they operate.” “We invest in a lot of the next-generation of vertical AI companies, a lot of the best founders have just lived and breathed with these customers to understand what’s going on under the hood,” she told TechCrunch. “No pun intended.” The insights from that trip helped Pamecha and Krivono...