The call was ordinary. Melisa Tokmak wanted an HVAC appointment during a spell of hot weather and found herself passed between the sorts of systems that seem designed to make a simple repair feel like a diplomatic negotiation. She later described that frustration as the beginning of Netic. A person needed a technician. The business presumably wanted the work. Between them stood a telephone, a schedule and too much friction.
In software, that sounds like a modest problem. In home services, it is the whole shop window. The customer with a broken furnace does not wait through a lengthy queue to admire your brand values. They call someone else. Netic’s bet is that the work of answering, qualifying, prioritizing and booking can be done by AI that understands a service business’s actual rules.
- Netic handles calls, texts, chat and third-party leads, then books jobs into existing business software.
- Its customers include Hoffmann Brothers, Service Professionals and the Bay Club.
- One customer tried a different AI agent first and shut it off after it made promises it could not keep.
- Hoffmann Brothers began with overflow support, then put Netic first across incoming channels.
- The company has announced $43 million in funding; its customer pricing is handled through sales conversations.
The worst day makes the best test
On May 16, 2025, a tornado struck St. Louis. Hoffmann Brothers, a large regional service company, received more than 600 calls in 90 minutes, according to an account its CEO gave. No sensible call center keeps enough people idle all year to answer a sudden crush like that. Yet each caller is a person whose roof, power or comfort may be in trouble.
Hoffmann Brothers had begun using Netic for after-hours and overflow calls. In the storm, Netic took most of the incoming calls and helped the company respond and sort requests at speed. The story matters because it tests a claim in the setting where failure is painfully visible: people need help now, and a booking mistake will soon arrive at someone’s front door.
A plain voice bot can say hello. Netic’s Convert product takes the call or message, asks for the details, answers routine questions, and schedules or reschedules a job. It connects to a customer’s CRM or field-service management system. In Hoffmann Brothers’ case, bookings go into ServiceTitan. The booking is supposed to respect the company’s capacity and rules: an urgent repair and an optional tune-up should not compete for the same scarce slot.
A promise a bot could not keep
Another customer supplies the cautionary tale. Service Professionals, a New Jersey plumbing, HVAC and electrical business, tried an AI agent before Netic. Its head of growth said the agent booked jobs and promised customers things the business could not deliver. The company turned it off. A later after-hours bot frustrated callers who repeated themselves through calls that stretched far longer than they should have.
“The first agent we tried went off the rails, booking jobs and promising customers things that we just couldn’t deliver on.”Casey Timorason, Service Professionals
That is the useful distinction in Netic’s pitch. A model can sound pleasant and still create a terrible Tuesday for the dispatcher. The hard part is fitting its words to the inventory of actual people, vehicles, skills and hours. Service Professionals says Netic later booked more than 2,000 jobs and helped generate $3 million in revenue growth over several months. These are customer-reported results, not a controlled trial; they do show why the company looked for more than a convincing voice.
At Hoffmann Brothers, the change of mind was gradual. Its leaders listened to calls, watched the results from overflow coverage and then put Netic first across inbound contact. That includes calls, SMS, site chat, online booking and outside lead sources. Staff still take situations that need judgment or a human touch. A customer case study says 70% of eligible jobs were eventually booked entirely by AI after that move. “Eligible” is doing honest work in that sentence: the hard cases still have a place to go.
The other half of the calendar
Demand does not merely surge. It disappears. The weather improves; the phones go quiet; the technicians still need work. Netic’s Cultivate product addresses that half of the ledger. It runs personalized campaigns from customer records and other signals, then takes the replies and books the resulting work. Hoffmann Brothers used it to contact members of its home protection plan about maintenance. The company says those outbound campaigns produced 2,900 jobs and $665,000 in revenue.
That suggests a different kind of marketing automation. Instead of sending everybody the same coupon, the system must know what was serviced, what might need attention, where the customer lives and whether a crew can get there. Netic says its platform combines business data with signals such as weather and property information. Its Empower analytics product then helps operators see performance across interactions; Evaluate scores human service calls against the company’s own standards and identifies coaching or recovery opportunities.
The products form a loop: capture work when it arrives, invite relevant work when it does not, and inspect where people or software lost the sale. It is a neat design. It also asks more of the customer than adding a chat widget. A business must describe its rules, connect its systems, review calls and decide when a person should step in. The software can only schedule accurately if the underlying calendar and policies are accurate.
The contractor is the customer
Netic is based in San Francisco and sells to businesses, especially larger service operators. Home services are its clearest proving ground, but the company also names automotive, wellness and consumer health. The Bay Club, a West Coast wellness operator, says Netic cut the average response to web leads from 60 minutes to seven seconds and raised conversion from 3.5% to 8.6%. A club membership is no emergency plumbing call, yet both depend on reaching a ready customer before interest cools.
There are alternatives. A contractor can hire more call-center staff, use a conventional receptionist service, buy a narrow AI voice tool, or wait for its field-service software provider to add the capability. Netic’s distinction is its effort to join inbound contact, outbound campaigns, booking rules and performance analysis. It often sits on top of existing systems rather than asking a company to replace them. That makes integration quality central to the purchase decision.
What does it cost? Netic does not publish a standard price on its site; prospective customers book a demo. For a buyer, the real arithmetic is broader than a software fee: missed jobs, call-center labor, marketing spend, implementation time and the cost of an incorrect promise. Hoffmann Brothers’ reported results are striking, but a small shop with few calls, a simple calendar and a person who always picks up may get less from this kind of system. So will any operation whose booking rules live only in one dispatcher’s head.
Start with after-hours or overflow demand. Record abandoned calls, qualified leads, booked jobs and errors before and after. Listen to actual conversations. Expand to first contact only when the calendar entries and customer experience hold up.
An expensive bet on a mundane moment
Netic emerged from stealth in June 2025 announcing $20 million across seed and Series A financing. In November it raised another $23 million in a Series B led by Founders Fund; the round was reported at a $450 million valuation. Investors include Greylock and Hanabi Capital. The money is a measure of ambition, though it is no substitute for a booked visit that happens as promised.
Tokmak’s original annoyance was small enough to be ignored by the rest of the AI industry. That is partly why it is interesting. The customer does not see a model architecture or a funding round. They see whether someone answers, understands the problem and sends the right person at the right time. In that narrow interval, Netic has built a company.