Toma Answers the Call of Auto Dealerships with $17M Series A

For an industry as integral to American life as auto dealerships, it’s remarkable how much customer communication still gets dropped. Nearly half of dealership calls go unanswered, a staggering figure in a business where missed calls often mean missed revenue, missed relationships, and ultimately, missed opportunities. In this gap, Toma, a voice AI startup, has found its opportunity.

Toma just raised $17 million in a Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Y Combinator, Scale Angels, and several angels from both the tech and auto worlds. The funding marks a turning point for the young company, founded in early 2024 by Monik Pamecha and Anthony Krivonos, as they grow their team from scratch.

Finding Their Voice in Auto Retail

“They just called us up and said ‘we are drowning in phone calls,’” Pamecha told TechCrunch, describing the moment car dealerships reached out unexpectedly during Toma’s early forays into voice AI. At the time, the team had been focused on highly regulated industries like finance and healthcare. But the sheer urgency and relative lack of compliance red tape in auto retail prompted a swift pivot.

The two founders embedded themselves in dealerships across Oklahoma and Mississippi, taking on tasks like tire rotations and manning phones to better understand the operational pain points. “We’re bringing the latest advancements in AI to an industry that touches people’s lives everyday,” Pamecha later wrote on LinkedIn. “45% of all dealership calls today go unanswered due to staffing pressures resulting in a variety of losses: lost revenue, lost customers and lost trust.”

Toma’s product is AI voice agents that schedule service appointments, handle parts orders, respond to sales queries, and field incoming texts and calls. In practice, however, the AI must account for dealership-specific variables (diesel-heavy repair shops, local promotional campaigns, etc.) which requires a tailored training period on actual customer calls. The system is designed to hand off to human staff when it’s unsure, and those interactions then help further refine its responses. It’s a learning loop, both for the AI and the business.

Toma isn’t the only company trying to automate dealership operations. Companies like Impel, and some in-house OEM solutions aim to integrate automation, CRM systems, and AI to streamline dealership communication. What sets Toma apart is its deeply vertical focus, born of direct fieldwork and a subscription-based model that aligns with incremental dealership value.

Seema Amble, a partner at a16z, put it this way: “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. No pun intended.”

But vertical focus is not a cure-all. Voice AI is notoriously tricky to get right, especially in environments with technical jargon, and noisy backdrops. There’s also the challenge of trust, both in the AI and in the consistency of its performance. Toma’s solution is not yet perfect; it relies on frequent handoffs and dealership-specific tuning, which means scaling will be a balancing act between growth and quality.

Furthermore, while AI can reduce call volumes and improve responsiveness, it doesn’t yet replicate the nuance of a seasoned service advisor or the upsell ability of a charismatic salesperson. Toma’s promise is efficiency, not empathy.

Still, any boost in responsiveness can translate to tangible ROI. Toma’s next challenge is to scale. The Series A will go toward expanding their sales efforts: a team that, until recently, didn’t even exist. Up until the last few weeks, Pamecha and Krivonos were still personally selling, just as they had during their road trip.