Problem

Toma addresses the operational bottleneck created by high-volume, fragmented customer communications at automotive dealerships. Sales, service, finance, parts, and other departments still depend heavily on manual phone work and legacy workflows, so calls go unanswered, appointments are missed, and staff spend time on repetitive questions instead of revenue-producing or customer-critical work. The economics are meaningful: Toma reports that Martin Management Group booked more than 9,000 service appointments and generated over $2 million in revenue in its first 90 days, while Middletown Honda saved more than $100,000 annually and eliminated missed calls during recall events.

The clearest use case is dealership service: answering inbound calls, scheduling appointments, checking recalls, and handling parts or vehicle-availability questions when human teams are busy or unavailable. The same problem extends to sales-lead response, where an immediate answer and persistent follow-up can determine whether an inquiry becomes an appointment or is lost to another dealership.

Product / Service

Toma provides AI Coworkers: personalized voice and digital agents that handle dealership phone calls, SMS, and email, execute workflows, and escalate exceptions to human staff. Its platform is positioned as an AI-first CRM that runs sales workflows, responds to every inbound lead, follows up through conversion, supports deal prequalification, tracks inventory and parts, and supplies interaction insights and reporting. The agents can be customized to a dealership’s brand, tone, phrasing, policies, and operating procedures, while integrations connect them to automotive-specific and legacy software.

The delivery model is enterprise workflow automation rather than a standalone chatbot. Toma says deployments go live in weeks, beginning with one workflow while dealership employees monitor conversations and feed edge cases back into the system; humans step in when judgment or intervention is required. This gives dealerships broader coverage and faster response times without requiring every call or lead to be handled manually, while preserving an escalation path for sensitive or complex interactions.

Market

Toma competes in vertical AI software for automotive retail, specifically dealership customer communications, call-center automation, CRM, and operational workflow automation. Automotive is a large, fragmented market: a16z cites roughly 18,000 franchised new-car dealerships in the United States and more than $1.2 trillion in collective 2024 sales. Toma’s longer-term positioning is a horizontal AI-agent platform for other high-friction service industries, but automotive remains its primary market. Adjacent alternatives cited in industry comparisons include Spyne, Numa, Podium, and PamHQ.

Toma is clearly post-revenue rather than pre-revenue. The company says it raised a $17 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, reached hundreds of customers through word-of-mouth sales, handled more than one million call minutes, surpassed seven figures in ARR in less than a year, and was approaching eight figures with more than 100 U.S. dealerships. Its reported customer results include Martin Management Group, Middletown Honda, Harvey Auto Group, and public dealership groups such as Lithia Motors and AutoNation, although the traction figures are primarily company-reported.