Large enterprises have emerged as the foremost adopters of artificial intelligence technology, and it’s giving them an unfair advantage over their smaller competitors.
Looking to change that is a startup called Hatz AI Inc., which has just raised $24 million in early-stage funding to empower managed services providers with the tools they need to keep AI simple for the smaller fish.
Today’s Series A round was led by Nadia Partners and saw backing from Vestigo Ventures and The Private Shares Fund. It will help Hatz AI scale up an MSP network that already spans all 50 U.S. states, nine Canadian provinces and nine other countries.
Co-founder and Chief Executive Jimmy Hatzell told SiliconANGLE that he sees small and medium-sized businesses as the lifeblood of the global economy, and he worries that they’re quickly being left behind by the AI revolution.
The challenge is that most smaller firms don’t have the in-house experts, such as the programmers and data scientists, nor the large budgets required to integrate AI into their business operations properly. For many, it’s simply impossible for them to make sense of an assortment of different third-party AI tools, chatbots and autonomous agents and absorb the unpredictable compute costs. And even if they do, they’ll almost certainly struggle to keep those systems and their data secure, Hatzell said.
Rather than go it alone, Hatzell believes that small businesses should instead look to the MSPs that already run much of their information technology systems. Many companies use an MSP to manage their cloud environments, day-to-day operations and keep everything secure, so they’re the most obvious partner to help them adopt AI too.
“AI transformation is existential for small and medium-sized businesses, but technology alone won’t make a business AI-native,” he said. “These SMBs need help from people they trust.”
However, those MSPs also need help if they’re going to be able to deliver AI services to those customers, and that’s where Hatz AI comes in. The startup has built an all-in-one AI operating system specifically for MSPs to offer AI securely to their customers. It operates as a multitenant AI control plane that comes complete with governance guardrails, spend tracking and automated routing tools to leading frontier models, so MSPs can package AI services under their own labels.
Instead of offering piecemeal AI tools, Hatz AI provides MSPs with access to a centralized team of customizable AI agents and workflows that are tailored to real-world business functions. For instance, there are purpose-built agents for automating internal ticket triage and technical operations, operational process automation, marketing content generation, sales lead qualification, financial bookkeeping and other standard business workflows. Hatzell said MSPs can use Hatz AI to offer these services to SMBs with simple deployment options and enterprise-grade security.
Nadia Partners’ Josh Schertzer said he’s backing Hatz AI because MSPs are the most logical partners to help smaller companies get to grips with AI. “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. “It’s setting the standard for how small businesses will adopt agentic workflows and next-generation AI tools securely.”
“By giving MSPs full control over governance, spend and deployment, we’re making it possible for every small business to become AI native,” Hatzell explained. “This capital accelerates our mission to put practical and secure AI within reach of every SMB in the world.”
Hatz AI’s decision to work with MSPs has already paid off, with its active MSP partner base tripling over the last year and its revenue growing at an even faster clip. To date, the company has issued more than 15,000 AI builder certifications globally. In the same timeframe, Hatz AI has grown its internal team from just 14 employees to more than 60, forcing it to open a new office in New York City to accommodate them all.
Going forward, the startup will use the funds from today’s round to build out its proprietary model-routing engines and internal software factory infrastructure and hire more staff to grow its forward-deployed engineering and AI research teams, Hatzell said.
Image: Hatz AI