When Monik Pamecha co-founded the vocal startup to Upper At the beginning of 2024, he had not foreseen to spend the summer months, sweating in the Bible belt dealers. He and co-founder Anthony Krivonos were still concentrated on banking and health customers when retailers knocked.
“They have just called and said” we are drowning in phone calls “, Pamecha described that initial contact in an interview with Techcrunch.
Seeing an opportunity to rotate in a much less regulated space than the banking or health sector, Pamecha and Krivonos have organized a test: they decided to make a voice call essentially any car dealership in the country several times. Over a few weeks they discovered that those called only 45% of the time have been taken.
The co-founders made their luggage. And as a sort of modern reinterpretation of the film “Tommy Boy”, they toured themselves in a dozen car dealers in Oklahoma and Mississippi to better understand how these business work. Hands dirty both in a figurative and literally sense; Pamecha said that his wife was surprised by fatty stains on clothes when she returned home.
That commitment gave its fruits. Not only did they win the customers, but they got the offensive of the complete charm of retailers. The founders shared the meals cooked in a house-nail sometimes embarrassing but fun, given the vegetarianism of Pamecha, he said and would have deprived to visit the Corvette Museum. At least one trader even asked Toma founders to tag a shot.
Sehema Amble, partner of A16z, who led the $ 17 million that Toma has collected to date, said that the couple who “lived effectively in dealers, going to the family barbecues of these retailers, really understanding how they operate”.
“We invest in most of the next generation of vertical artificial intelligence companies, many of the best founders have just lived and breathed with these customers to understand what is happening under the hood,” Shet said to Techcrunch. “No drilling.”
The intuitions of that trip helped Pamecha and Krivonos to refine the vocal agent of Toma in an instrument that is already in use in over 100 dealers across the country. Artificial intelligence helps customers to plan service appointments, manage parts of parties, answer the sales questions and more.
Together with A16z, Pamecha and Krivonos attractive investments from Y Combinator (they created Toma a YC in January 2024), the Fund Scale Angels and the influencer of the automotive sector Yossi Levi, also known as Guy of the dealership.
Levi told Techcrunch that the dealers fight with the phone calls in part because it is difficult to predict the volume.
“Expires and flows. Somit you are overwhelmed by the question. Other times there is not enough question, and pairing of the staff and training correctly that the staff is made up of an experience is not an easy thing to do,” said Levi. Artificial intelligence has “provided retailers with the opportunity to really standardize that process and delight a richest customer experience that is composed”.
Pamecha said that the Toma onboarding process provides for training on the calls of clients of retailers for one or two weeks to give the AI some context. This is important because while dealers do the same things widely, there can be a lot of variance in detail. Some retailers may serve more diesel engines, for example. Dealers also perform many personalized promotions for both sales and service.
After that initial explosion of training, the upper begins to take calls, delivering to human employees if and when it is baffled. Those transmission calls are also analyzed to strengthen the artificial intelligence model to better help that specific dealership. From a corporate point of view, Toma manages a subscription model. Since agents to more parts of a dealer operations can manage, these agreements will have to pay for these extra capabilities.
The Serie A “arrives in a great moment” for Toma, according to Pamecha. The startup has taken on its first real sales employee in recent weeks. Before then, Pamecha and Krivonos was still largely that hurried as they did throughout the country last summer.
Without that journey, however, Pamecha said it is not sure that Toma would reach this point.
“It was one of the best experience of my life,” he said. “I feel like we were all friends and I think everything comes from a place of similar, feeling their pain. I think they see that we also feel the bread.”
