Large companies have been stuffing artificial intelligence software into every possible product for years. Now, Founders Fund is backing a startup that wants to help small businesses use the technology, too.
Netic, which just raised $23 million in a Series B funding round led by the firm, is equipping businesses and contractors like electricians, roofers and repairmen with AI tools.
It’s not the only Silicon Valley startup to target small businesses. Chris Hoffmann, who runs home services company Hoffmann Brothers, says he’s been bombarded by pitches for AI tools for years.
But Netic, which offers products that help with a wide range of services, had a different spiel. The company’s leadership had “a product vision which extended far beyond this point solution narrow focus,” Hoffmann said. Its software helps with everything from tracking call volume to customer intake to actually booking workers’ visits, he said.
Earlier this year, when a tornado hit St. Louis, damaging homes across the city. Hoffmann said his company’s roofing business got more than 600 calls in 90 minutes. Netic’s AI customer service tools took most of those calls, allowing the company to respond at a much higher speed and triage requests.
The startup, valued at $450 million in the latest funding round, was founded by Melisa Tokmak. Its seed round was led by Greylock Partners with Founders Fund participating, and its Series A was led by Founders Fund with participation from Greylock, Hanabi Capital, Day One Ventures, SV Angel and several angel investors.
Backing three early funding rounds in a row is something Founders Fund rarely does, said Amin Mirzadegan, the partner who led the deals. The last companies that Founders Fund had enough conviction to back in a similar way were Cognition AI and Anduril Industries Inc., where they also did three successive early rounds, Mirzadegan said.
“The AI opportunity for serving Main Street companies, we feel, is enormous,” he said. “Mainstream businesses don’t get a lot of love or attention from Silicon Valley historically. Fundamentally, reaching a customer in Gary, Indiana, is probably a lot harder than reaching a customer down the road in Sunnyvale, California.”
Tokmak has an unique resume for a Silicon Valley founder. Born in a small town in Turkey, she left home for a boarding school near Istanbul at 13, studied math and physics in India, and later went to Stanford University. After graduating, she worked on product and engineering teams at Facebook and at Scale AI, where she helped spearhead the company’s government and security focus.
She was still working for Scale when her home in California’s Marin County needed a new heating and ventilation system. But when she started contacting service providers, she encountered a problem that will be familiar to any homeowner — difficult-to-reach businesses, dropped leads and garbled text messages.
Her climate-control system saga prompted her to start Netic as a platform to handle incoming customer requests and visits using AI customer service agents.