Why Andreessen Horowitz is betting big on this AI startupHow Toma is building AI agents for the automotive dealership industry
✨ Hey there this is a free edition of next play’s newsletter, where we share under-the-radar opportunities to help you figure out what’s next in your journey. Join our private Slack community here and access $1000s of dollars of product discounts here. I know a lot of people who find themselves in a similar position with their career; they are hungry to make an impact on a meaningful project but cannot seem to figure out what to do. Do not get me wrong. They are very smart and capable and high-agency people. And they are trying things…talking to mentors…reading books…looking on Twitter for inspiration…even joining Friends of Next Play ;). But still…they feel lost. If you find yourself in this position, I can tell you that you are certainly not alone. There’s countless people dealing with this same dilemma. If I could only give one small piece of general advice to people in this situation, here’s what I would tell them: “Keep making things.” Keep making things. Building projects. Sending emails. Researching opportunities. You really never know where you’re going to land. Keep momentum going. You would be surprised by where momentum can take you. Often, much further than you can even imagine. I recently heard an inspiring story from Monik and Anthony, the founders of Toma. They were previously software engineers in search of a problem worth solving. They, perhaps like many of you reading this, were not exactly sure what to work on. And so, they experimented with a number of different prototypes until eventually developing one of the world’s first realistic Voice AI apps. They explored using this prototype in a number of different areas until they eventually landed conversations with some (very excited!) automotive dealers. Fast forward less than two years and they’ve made tremendous progress. Toma has found extremely strong product-market-fit (150% growth over the past 2 months). Here’s a recent customer testimonial: “My experience with Toma has been 10 out of 10. It saves 43 hours of our advisors’ time on average each month so we can focus on in-person customers and drive revenue. It’s almost like we added another member to our team.” And they recently announced that they raised a $17m Series A from a16z to scale their suite of AI agents that help automotive dealerships make their sales and customer support functions more efficient. (And yes of course, they are hiring ex-founders, marketers, salespeople, engineers, and a chief of staff). I thought it would be interesting to go behind-the-scenes with the Toma team in this Next Play Spotlight. To learn more about the early days of finding and now scaling product-market-fit. And to see what it’s like to work at the company.
Major thanks to the Toma team for sharing details with us and supporting the Next Play community. Everyone is hyped up about AI these days. A few months back, Mark Zuckerberg spoke with John Collison (co-founder of Stripe) and made a prediction; he said that every business will eventually have its own AI agent running sales and customer support. The counter-argument to this idea is that much of the economy is still running on legacy infrastructure. It takes time (often lots of time, like many decades!) for enterprise incumbents and SMBs to adopt new technologies. That’s where “vertical software companies” can step in, and take a core technology (like AI) and tailor it to make it 10x more useful for a very particular industry to accelerate adoption. For a successful example of this, you can look at the company Toast, a now $23 billion public company that builds a vertical suite of software for the restaurant industry. That’s also what Toma is doing, as they bring software and AI to the automotive dealership space (a $2 trillion industry globally). The automotive dealership industry is not exactly classically “sexy”. You do not often read about it in the headlines. And it’s rare you find a founder who really understands the nuances of the space. But that does not mean it’s not incredibly lucrative, primed for disruption, and underserved. For an ambitious startup founder who wants to build a giant business, that’s a very compelling combination. When Monik and Anthony were testing out their early prototypes, they received lots of interest from automotive dealerships but could not understand why people seemed so excited. It was only after meeting with several dealerships and getting into the weeds that they learned just how perfect the match between AI and automotive dealerships really was:
But what Monik and Anthony probably did not realize in the very beginning was perhaps just how big the automotive dealership industry really is, as it spans every state and impacts nearly every person and business in the US. So now they’re scaling very very quickly, chasing this multi-billion dollar opportunity (that they probably did not know existed 10 years ago).
They have grown 150%+ in just the last 2 months! What have they done internally to seize this unique opportunity? It seems like the founders ended up doing a bunch of things correctly but one underlying piece is that they, very early on, went “all-in” on helping their company achieve success. The founders are completely invested in the long-term success of the business.
You would be surprised by how many founders I’ve met who appear checked out or out of touch with the day to day of their startup. It sounds obvious, but it’s so easy to lose sight of what’s important when a business is growing. And that happens much more frequently when the founders are checked out or not focused on the company. Early on, Monik and Anthony also recognized the importance of going “all in” on their team. They realized that the team they built was perhaps just as (or even more!) important than their product. And so, with a lot of hard work, they were able to hire really productive people. But, especially in the beginning, it was not obvious who to hire. Who would be the right fit for this type of company. There were so many people attracted to the hype of AI startups. Lots of applications but it was not clear that those are necessarily the right types of candidates. They set out looking for a different type of profile. They wanted to find people who were more clearly grounded and long-term oriented. People who wanted to build. And people who wanted to challenge themselves as they took on an ambitious opportunity.
They’ve found success in discovering raw talent and giving them loads of responsibility. They took chances on people before anyone else really did, and have been very impressed with the outcomes:
To aid in their vetting, they have been pretty creative about their interview process. Rather than rely on credentials or typical assessments, they’ve used work trials to figure out mutual fit:
The result is that a big chunk of their early team is more or less generalist in nature - meaning they can pick up new topics quickly and dive deep without needing lots of context, and also that their work spans multiple categories and cannot easily be confined to a typical department or title. They are just the type of people who care about getting stuff done above all else.
This sort of raw talent is not their whole team. They have also recently brought on new teammates like Jon VanderSteeg who have more than a decade of retail automotive experience. But the mix of talent is what is really interesting. Blending people with raw talent with people with industry expertise has created a culture with lots of humility as everyone seems to be able to learn something from each other. Teammates at Toma describe their teammates fondly.
And it’s this sort of high trust environment, where people enjoy collaborating with one another, that’s really important to maintain as the company enters a mode of hyperscale. Racing to keep up with demandToma is at an exciting stage in that everyone at the company is racing to keep up with their product-market-fit. The market is literally pulling them forwards, and they feel like there is very little competition:
Everyone at the company is inspired by the opportunity they see so clearly right in front of them:
The race to keep up with demand leaves little time for distractions. No pointless meetings. No company politics. No real bureaucracy slowing things down. Everything at this stage is really oriented around getting things done as productively as possible:
(Note that the Toma team does leave time and looks forward to playing late night Smash Bros and wandering around SF together every once in a while)
And because they are very much at the bleeding edge of “vertical AI” (being one of the first startups to ship actual AI products to real customers), there’s a bunch of new problems to solve.
That’s why they are looking for ambitious, kind people who are excited to…”keep building.”
Toma is hiring for many roles in SF: ex-founders, marketers, salespeople, engineers, and a chief of staff. You can apply here. And if you are looking for more opportunities, be sure to check out Next Play. You're currently a free subscriber to next play. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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Why Andreessen Horowitz is betting big on this AI startup
Thursday, 25 September 2025
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