Hatz AI raises $24 million to bring AI to small businesses through their IT providers

Hatz AI, a New York startup whose AI platform is sold exclusively through managed service providers rather than directly to businesses, has raised a $24 million Series A led by Nadia Partners, with Vestigo Ventures and The Private Shares Fund also taking part 2

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Why sell through MSPs

Chief executive Jimmy Hatzell argues that small businesses lack the in-house expertise, budgets and security capabilities to adopt AI on their own, and that they should lean on the managed service providers, or MSPs, that already run their IT 2

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. "Small businesses are trying to figure out how to transform themselves right now into being AI-first or AI-native, and it's a job that's very, very hard to do without help," he said 2

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The company's growth is the case it makes to investors. Its network of managed service provider partners has tripled over the past year, and revenue has grown faster still, according to the company 2

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. Hatzell said the company is growing quickly and saw an opportunity to invest in its own platform as demand for AI services from small and midsize businesses accelerates 2

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What the money buys

The funding is earmarked to roughly double a workforce of about 60, most of the new hires landing in engineering, AI research and forward-deployed engineering 2

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. The company has grown from 14 employees since its founding and recently opened a new New York City office 1

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. Planned spending also covers research on model evaluation, performance and cost, plus new teams building proprietary model-routing engines 2

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The investment, Hatzell said, will help MSPs build the technical expertise to create customized AI solutions rather than simply reselling tools 2

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. That intent is already visible in the company's own technical work. It built a proprietary benchmark of about 500 tasks measuring how well AI completes real jobs, using data from its own customers. The company says that work fed a rebuild of much of the platform over two months 2

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The platform and its reach

The platform itself is a multitenant control plane, giving MSPs governance guardrails, spending tracking and automatic routing to frontier AI models 1

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. That lets MSPs package AI services under their own brands. It ships with ready-made agents for tasks such as support ticket triage, process automation, marketing content, sales lead qualification and bookkeeping 1

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. The company says it has issued more than 15,000 of its AI builder certifications worldwide 2

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The network's size is described as thousands of MSPs, per the company 2

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. The two reports differ on geography: one counts about 10 countries, the other coverage spanning every US state, nine Canadian provinces and nine more countries 2

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Josh Schertzer, the Nadia Partners partner who led the investment and previously served as Blackstone's chief technology officer, credited the channel focus itself: "By focusing exclusively on powering MSPs rather than trying to sell directly to end users, Hatz AI has built a true dominance in channel-delivered AI," he said 1

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. Tim Guim, who runs partner firm PCH Technologies, called the raise a vote of confidence: "This is going to allow Hatz AI to further expand how it helps us deliver AI-as-a-service more deeply to our customers" 2

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For Hatzell, the long-term aim is for those MSPs to become the trusted advisers small businesses rely on as AI changes how they work 2

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. "AI transformation is existential for small and medium-sized businesses, but technology alone won't make a business AI-native," he said 1

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