Hatz AI is an AI curation platform built specifically for managed service providers (MSPs) to deliver AI-as-a-Service to small and medium-sized businesses under their own brands. The platform combines AI agents, automated workflows, chat, email, phone interactions, governance controls, and access to more than 60 AI models while allowing MSPs to manage multiple clients through a multi-tenant environment. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Hatz AI Co-Founder and CEO Jimmy Hatzell to learn more about the company’s channel-first strategy, AI adoption among SMBs, and plans for future growth.
Jimmy Hatzell’s Background
When asked about his background, Hatzell shared:
My background is rooted in the MSP and cybersecurity channel. I graduated from Penn State University with a degree in Information Sciences and Technology, which gave me the technical foundation I needed, but it was the decade I spent working inside the channel that really shaped how I think.
I got my start at SKOUT Cybersecurity, where I helped build out their channel program essentially from scratch. I went through the journey of SKOUT’s Series B and its eventual acquisition by Barracuda, which gave me a front-row seat to what it really takes to scale a company and bring new technology through the MSP community.
From there, I moved into a revenue leadership role at CyberQP, where I continued to deepen my understanding of how MSPs adopt, operationalize, and monetize emerging technology.
What ties all of it together is a personal connection to small businesses. I grew up watching my parents build their own, and that experience never left me.
It shaped my belief that small businesses are critical to driving our economy, and that they deserve access to the same powerful technology that large enterprises take for granted.
That’s ultimately what led me to co-found Hatz AI: a genuine conviction that MSPs are the right partners to bring meaningful AI to the SMBs in their communities.
How Hatz AI Started
When asked how the idea for Hatz AI came together, Hatzell explained:
The origin story is one I genuinely enjoy telling, because it started with what felt like a risky answer in a job interview.
When I met Aidan Kehoe, who would ultimately become my co-founder, I was interviewing for a role at his company, SKOUT Cybersecurity.
He asked the standard five-year question, and I told him honestly that I didn’t know exactly what my role there would look like, because I planned to start my own company.
Most people would have ended the interview right there.
Aidan offered me the job on the spot, with the condition that when I was ready to start that company, he’d be a part of it.
That was 2018.
We spent years working together through SKOUT’s growth and acquisition by Barracuda.
By the time 2023 arrived, we were both watching AI materialize in real time and it became obvious that small and medium-sized businesses were going to need help navigating it.
The same way they needed help with cybersecurity, they were going to need a trusted partner to bring AI to them safely and practically.
The issue wasn’t a lack of AI tools. It was that nothing existed that was built specifically for MSPs, white-label, channel-first, profitable, and simple enough to deploy and explain to an SMB.
So Aidan and I built exactly that.
We launched Hatz AI in January 2024, and our first products went live in March of that year.
Favorite Memories
When asked about his favorite memory working at Hatz AI so far, Hatzell said:
It’s less a single moment and more of a collection of them that remind me why I’m doing this work.
When we first launched, a lot of our MSP partners felt like AI was something happening to them.
It was moving fast, their clients were asking questions they didn’t have answers to, and the whole thing felt overwhelming.
Watching those same partners, just months later, walk into client conversations as confident AI advisors, that transformation is what I’m most proud of.
There have been individual moments that stick with me: partners telling us they landed net-new clients because of their AI practice, MSPs who hired their first dedicated AI staff member, channel partners who built entirely new service lines on top of what we built together.
Those conversations remind me exactly why we started this company.
Core Products And Features
When asked about Hatz AI’s core products and features, Hatzell detailed:
At its core, Hatz is an AI curation platform that productizes AI use cases for small and medium-sized businesses and then distributes through Managed Service Providers (MSP).
We take AI capabilities and make them practical, governed, and deliverable at the SMB level.
The platform gives MSPs everything they need to offer AI-as-a-Service to their clients under their own brand.
There are numerous ways to interact with it: AI agents, automated workflows, chat, email, phone, and more.
We support a constantly evolving list of 60-plus AI models, so partners always have access to the best tools available without managing multiple subscriptions or API keys.
At the heart of the product is control.
AI is fundamentally a trade-off between usability and risk, and our job is to mitigate that risk while keeping the experience genuinely convenient for end users.
That means businesses get the benefits of AI without the exposure, their data stays governed, their workflows stay secure, and their people stay in control of how AI is used.
The platform is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant and multi-tenant by design, so MSPs can manage multiple clients from a single dashboard and white-label the entire experience with their own branding.
And with loads of integrations into the tools businesses already use every day, AI becomes part of how work gets done and not something separate to manage on top of it.
Keeping Pace With AI
When asked about recent challenges in the sector and how Hatz AI has addressed them, Hatzell explained:
The biggest one is simply that AI moves extremely fast.
The landscape shifts constantly, new models, new capabilities, new expectations, and staying current while also staying focused requires real discipline.
We’ve spent a lot of time building the muscles to ship quickly and evolve alongside AI itself.
Our product and engineering teams are structured in a deliberate way that lets us move fast, incorporate partner feedback in real time, and keep the platform current without chasing every trend that surfaces.
The filter we keep coming back to is simple: does this actually help our MSP partners serve their customers better?
If the answer isn’t yes, we move on.
There was also the early challenge of earning trust, which was completely understandable.
MSPs have been on the receiving end of a lot of vendor hype.
We had to earn the right to be taken seriously and we did that by keeping things simple, showing up for the hard conversations, and building the right product instead of the most feature-heavy one.
On the end-customer side, we worked closely with partners to shift messaging away from features and toward outcomes.
Not “here’s what the AI can do,” but “here’s the specific problem this solves for you today.”
That reframe made a real difference in adoption.
How The Technology Has Evolved
When asked how Hatz AI’s technology has evolved since launching, Hatzell said:
When we launched in January 2024, we had a clear vision but a lean product.
What’s happened since has been shaped almost entirely by partner feedback, and the platform today looks materially different from where we started.
One of the most meaningful shifts has been moving away from chat as the primary interface and bringing AI to where people actually work.
If someone wants to email with their AI, talk on the phone with their AI, or interact through the tools they already use, we want to meet them there.
That transition reflects a broader maturation in how AI gets used in real business environments.
We’ve also seen a significant increase in tool use and agent-based capabilities, and the models themselves have become dramatically more effective.
Our engineering team ships multiple feature releases every week.
New integrations. New functionality improvements. Platform enhancements.
And all prioritized based on direct input from MSP partners and their clients.
Key Company Milestones
When asked about some of Hatz AI’s most significant milestones, Hatzell highlighted:
There are a few that stand out as genuine proof points.
Launching in January 2024 with strong investor conviction, from partners including Vestigo Ventures, Matt Higgins of Shark Tank and RSE Ventures, and Jon McNeill, the former President of Tesla and COO of Lyft, was the starting point and came with a meaningful signal of confidence in what we were building.
Shipping our first generally available products in March 2024 was when the platform went from concept to reality for MSP partners.
Growing to more than 1,000 MSP partners around the world is one of our biggest proof points.
But what really matters is how we got there. Most of those partners joined because another MSP told them about us.
That’s not a marketing metric. That’s a genuine channel fit.
Our 150% net revenue retention rate reflects that partners aren’t just staying, they’re growing.
Expanding their deployments, adding clients, and building out AI practices quarter over quarter.
Appalachia Technologies
When asked to share a specific customer success story, Hatzell said:
One of the partnerships I’m most proud of is with Appalachia Technologies, an MSP, MSSP, and cybersecurity firm helping small and mid-sized businesses manage their IT, security, and compliance needs.
Their story captures exactly what we set out to build.
Appalachia joined the Hatz platform in November 2024 with a clear goal: build a practical AI strategy they could actually deliver to clients, not just talk about.
That distinction matters.
The challenge every MSP faces is the gap between AI hype and what’s actually deployable in a client environment, especially when those clients are in regulated industries with real compliance constraints and no dedicated AI teams.
They needed a partner who understood managed services from the inside, not a vendor selling to the enterprise and hoping the model translates down-market.
Over the past year, Appalachia has expanded their AI-enabled service offerings significantly, integrating AI into marketing, sales, support, NOC, and SOC workflows, and embedded AI-assisted services as a core part of their managed services stack, not an add-on.
That’s an important distinction.
AI isn’t a separate product line for them anymore. It’s woven into how they deliver service every day.
What they told us made the partnership work is something we hear from the best partners: every conversation has been about outcomes, not features.
Their team described every interaction with Hatz as genuinely helpful and focused on what they can actually do for their clients.
A true partnership, not a vendor relationship.
They also called out our enablement specifically: their sales team received pitch decks and hands-on training with a Hatz account executive, and that support didn’t stop after onboarding.
They noted that our training materials stand out because they cover not just the platform, but AI broadly, including the legal and ethical considerations that most vendors gloss over.
For team members newer to AI, they called it the best on-ramp they’ve seen.
Appalachia Technologies is one example of a pattern we see across our partner base: MSPs who had no AI story a year ago now have a complete, differentiated AI practice.
One they built on Hatz, under their own brand, with confidence in both the technology and their ability to sell it.
Growth Metrics
When asked about funding and revenue metrics, Hatzell explained:
We’re proud of the investor confidence in Hatz AI’s vision, but what’s most exciting right now is the momentum we’re seeing in the business.
It’s the kind of growth that tells us we’re solving real problems for MSPs and the small businesses they support.
Our Annual Recurring Revenue growth from 2024 to 2025 jumped by over 670%, and the start of 2026 is already tracking toward 10x the growth we saw last year.
What matters even more is how our partners are using the product.
MSPs are expanding their usage of Hatz AI, reflected in our 150% Net Revenue Retention.
Our ecosystem now includes over 1,000 partners around the world.
For us, these numbers aren’t just business wins.
They show that MSPs are becoming more efficient, more capable, and better equipped to deliver real value to the SMBs that rely on them every day.
Total Addressable Market
When asked about the total addressable market Hatz AI is pursuing, Hatzell explained:
The opportunity is significant.
There are approximately 33 million small and medium-sized businesses across the United States alone, and the vast majority of them are going to need help adopting AI.
They’re likely not going to figure it out on their own and they’ll turn to the trusted technology partner they already rely on: their MSP.
There are an estimated 40,000 MSPs in the U.S., and globally that number is even larger.
These are the businesses we’re enabling.
Every MSP that joins the Hatz platform becomes a multiplier, bringing AI to the dozens or hundreds of SMB clients they already serve.
The broader AI-as-a-Service market is projected to grow into the hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade.
But the more specific and defensible opportunity for us is the intersection of the managed services market and AI adoption for SMBs, a segment that has historically been underserved by enterprise-focused AI vendors and left largely on its own.
We made a deliberate choice early on to focus on that intersection.
The TAM is large, the channel is proven, and the trust MSPs have already built with their clients is an asset no enterprise AI vendor can replicate.
Competitive Differentiation
When asked what differentiates Hatz AI from its competition, Hatzell said:
The most important differentiator is focus.
Hatz AI is the only purpose-built AI platform designed exclusively for MSPs to sell.
Every product decision, every pricing structure, every enablement resource, and every support interaction is built around one question: does this help our MSP partners win?
Most alternatives in the market are either selling directly to large enterprises and treating a partner program as an afterthought, or they’re horizontal AI tools that MSPs are left to figure out how to package, price, and deliver on their own.
Neither of those approaches works for the SMB market.
Hatz AI has no direct sales motion. We don’t compete with our partners.
The channel is the entire business, and that singular focus is what separates us from everything else in the market.
A differentiator that doesn’t get talked about enough is control.
AI is fundamentally a trade-off between capability and risk, and the businesses that succeed with it are the ones that can manage that trade-off.
Hatz is built to give MSPs and their clients genuine control over how AI is used, what data it touches, how it behaves, who can access it, and how it fits within the existing compliance and governance requirements of the business.
That’s not a feature. It’s a foundation.
That commitment shows up operationally too.
We built the enablement infrastructure, certification programs, training materials, and our Partner Engagement Series, that gives MSPs the confidence and competency to sell AI services without needing an in-house AI team.
The result is partners who aren’t just reselling a tool, they’re running a differentiated AI practice, under their own brand, with margin structures that work.
And perhaps the most authentic proof point: Hatz AI is an AI-native business ourselves.
A team of approximately 35 people operates at a velocity that would require two to three times the headcount at a traditional software company, because we’ve embedded AI into every function.
We don’t just sell AI transformation. We’re a living demonstration of it.
Future Goals
When discussing Hatz AI’s future goals, Hatzell explained:
Our focus right now is on three things.
The first is depth.
We want our existing partners to go further, more customers served, more use cases deployed, more value delivered.
We’re rolling out new packages for rapid adoption, better analytics, a revamped admin dashboard, and expanded human support as partners scale their AI practices.
We want to make it easier for them to grow, and we want to make sure the platform keeps pace with that growth.
The second is becoming the default AI layer MSPs reach for when a client asks, “What can you do for us with AI?”
We’re investing in deeper integrations with the tools MSPs already live in, PSAs, RMMs, and the rest of their stack, so AI becomes part of how they deliver service, not something they manage separately.
And honestly, the third goal, and perhaps the most important one, is to keep listening.
Our partners have taught us more about this market than any strategy document ever could.
The more closely we work with them, the better the product gets.
That feedback loop is not something we take for granted.
In fact, it’s the backbone of everything we’re building.
The bigger picture is this: we believe MSPs will be the catalysts that bring AI to the 33 million SMBs across the United States and beyond.
Our job is to make sure those MSPs are equipped, confident, and profitable doing it.
If we do that well, the rest of the growth follows.
