When Monik Pamecha was a co -founder of AI Voice Startup Tom At the starting of 2024, he didn’t expect to spend summer months at the Bible Car Dealer. He and co -founder Anthony Krivonos continued to focus on banking and healthcare clients when the dealers knock.
“They just called us and said:” They are drying in telephone conversations, “he described this initial contact in an interview with TechCrunch.
Seeing the possibility of switching in a much less regulated space than banking or healthcare, Pamecha and Krivonos set the test: They decided to call every car showroom in the country many times. Within a few weeks they found that these connections were received only in 45% of cases.
Co -founders packed their bags. And like some contemporary reinterpretation of the film “Tommy Boy”, they decided to go to a dozen car dealers in Oklahomie and Mississippi to raised understand how these corporations are working. They dressed their hands figuratively and literally; Pamecha said his wife was surprised by fat spots on her clothes when he returned home.
This commitment paid off. Not only did they won customers, but received the full offensive of dealers. The founders shared their home meals-sometimes awkward, but a broken romance, taking into account Pamech’s vegetarianism, said and they were invited to explore the Corvette Museum. At least one seller even asked the founders of Tom to mark the shooting range.
SEEMA AMLE, a partner A16Z, who ran $ 17 million, which Tom had collected so far, said that the couple “lives effectively in these dealers, going to the family grills of these dealers, really understanding how they work.”
“We invest in many new generation of vertical AI companies, many of the best founders have just lived and breathed with these clients to understand what is happening under the hood,” said Techcrunch. “Lack of intended game of words.”
The observations from this journey helped Pamech and Krivonos sharpen the Tom voice agent into a tool that is already used in over 100 dealer throughout the country. AI helps customers plan service meetings, handle orders for parts, answer sales questions and many others.
Together with A16Z Pamech and Krivonos, they attracted the Y Combinator investments (they created Tom on YC in January 2024), Scale Fund Angels Fund and Influencester in the Yossi Levi automotive industry, also often called a car dealer guy.
Levi told Techcrunch that dealers are fighting partly with telephone conversations because it is difficult to predict the volume.
“It drains and flows. AI” gave dealers the possibility of really standardization of this process and providing richer customer support, which is consistent. ”
Pamecha said that the technique of implementing Tom includes training in calling dealers’ clients for a week or two to provide AI a context. This is vital because although dealers do the same things wide, there could also be a large variance of details. For example, some dealers can support more diesel engines. Dealers also conduct many custom promotions for each sales and service.
After the initial explosion of Tom, Tom AI begins to receive calls, passing on to human employees if and when it is assumed. These connections with the transfer are also analyzed to strengthen the AI model to raised help this specific dealer. On Tom’s business side, he runs a subscription model. Because AI agents can handle more parts of the dealer’s activities, dealers will have to pay for these additional possibilities.
According to Pamech, the series A “Comes at A A Great Time” for Tom. The startup has hired his first real sales worker over the past few weeks. Earlier it was still largely Pamech and Krivonos Husting, as in the whole country of last summer.
Without this journey, Pamech said he wasn’t sure if Tom would reach this point.
“It was one of the best experiences in my life,” he said. “I feel that we all became friends and I think that all this comes from a similar place, feeling their pain. I think they see that we feel pain.”