Newo.ai announced it raised a $25 million Series A round led by Ratmir Timashev, the co-founder of Veeam Software and co-founder of OH.io, as the company looks to scale its AI voice and messaging infrastructure for small and medium-sized businesses. The San Francisco-based startup said the financing brings its total capital raised to about $32 million, following earlier angel, seed, and SAFE rounds, with Aloniq, Constructor, Acrobator, and s16vc also participating.
Newo is positioning its product as production-grade “always-on” voice and text agents that answer, route, and resolve customer inquiries across phone calls, SMS, web chat, and messaging platforms, including WhatsApp. The company said it targets operational use cases for SMBs, such as appointment booking, lead qualification, order intake, and customer support, and is built around structured workflows for routing, escalation, and handoff to handle real-world voice conditions, including noisy environments, ambiguous requests, and after-hours calls.
The company argues the opportunity is driven by missed inbound demand, stating that SMBs often miss 20–40% of inbound calls due to staffing constraints and after-hours volume. Newo said that when AI voice systems work reliably in live environments, businesses can stop missing calls, recover 20–40% of previously lost revenue, and deliver a faster and more consistent customer experience without adding staff. It also cited data suggesting small businesses leave about 62% of calls unanswered.
Newo described itself as partner-first, designed for MSPs, VoIP providers, software companies, and agencies to deploy and white-label AI reception and customer communication solutions for SMB customers. The company said more than 15,000 AI agents have been created on its platform, supported by a network of more than 200 certified partners, with early adoption in dental practices, restaurants, home services, and cleaning businesses. Newo also said it doubled revenue in the final two months of 2025 and entered 2026 with continued momentum.
As an example of ROI, Newo pointed to Image Orthodontics, a multi-location Bay Area practice, saying it identified it was missing nearly 20% of inbound calls during peak and after-hours periods and generated more than $400,000 in incremental revenue in the first quarter after deploying Newo’s AI receptionist, driven by newly booked appointments and after-hours inquiries.
A key product claim is Newo’s “Zero-Hallucination Architecture,” which it said uses multiple voice and text agents to verify responses in parallel to improve accuracy and reliability in customer conversations. The company said the architecture enables sub-second latency, human-like voice quality, and performance suitable for high-volume phone answering use cases.
Newo said it will use the new capital to accelerate product development, expand its partner ecosystem, and scale go-to-market efforts, while also investing in additional AI voice capabilities for new industries and use cases.
KEY QUOTES
“Small businesses are under pressure to respond instantly, but most still lose revenue simply because no one picks up the phone. After decades spent building enterprise AI at scale as a co-founder of ABBYY, it was clear to me that voice was the last major customer channel that hadn’t been rebuilt for automation. Newo is changing that by making AI agents accurate, reliable, and genuinely usable in real business environments. This investment lets us scale a platform that is already becoming core infrastructure for how small businesses capture demand and invest in growing our partners who deliver it.”
David Yang, Co-Founder, Newo; Co-Founder, ABBYY
“AI has reached a point where it can move from experimentation into core business operations. What stood out about Newo’s voice AI solution was not the promise, but the proof. Businesses are already depending on AI Receptionists by Newo to handle real customer communications 24/7, faster and more accurately than human agents, driving revenue through superior customer experience.”
Ratmir Timashev, Co-Founder, Veeam Software; Co-Founder, OH.io
