Hatz AI Raises $24M on a Simple Idea: Small Businesses Will Get AI From the IT Company They Already Trust

NEW YORK — If you run a dental office, an accounting firm or a 20-person nonprofit in New York, there’s a decent chance you don’t have an IT department. You have an IT company: a managed service provider, or MSP, that handles your laptops, email, backups and security for a monthly fee. A Flatiron startup just raised $24 million on the bet that those same firms will be how most small businesses end up using AI.

Hatz AI announced its Series A on Thursday. The round was led by Nadia Partners, where partner Josh Schertzer, a former CTO at Blackstone, led the deal, with Vestigo Ventures and The Private Shares Fund participating. Founded by Jimmy Hatzell and Aidan Kehoe in 2023, Hatz has now raised $26.5 million in reported equity funding, according to AlleyWatch.

What Hatz Sells, and to Whom

Hatz doesn’t sell to small businesses directly. It sells to MSPs, giving them what it calls an AI “control plane”: one system where the IT provider can set rules for each client, track spending, build custom workflows and route requests automatically across leading AI models. The MSP then packages the service under its own brand.

SiliconANGLE reported that the platform includes ready-made agents for common jobs such as ticket triage, process automation, marketing content, sales lead qualification and bookkeeping.

“AI transformation is existential for small and medium-sized businesses, but technology alone won’t make a business AI native — SMBs need help from people they trust,” Hatzell said in the announcement.

Schertzer framed the no-direct-sales choice as the point: “By focusing exclusively on powering MSPs rather than trying to sell directly to end-users, Hatz has built a true dominance in channel-delivered AI.”

The Numbers the Company Shared

According to Hatz, its partner network covers thousands of MSPs across all 50 states, nine Canadian provinces and nine other countries. The company says its active MSP partner count tripled over the past year, with revenue growing faster, and that it has issued more than 15,000 AI certifications to people building on the platform. Its headcount grew from 14 to roughly 60, and it is expanding its footprint in Flatiron. It did not disclose revenue.

The money will go toward its model-routing engine, benchmarks and internal software infrastructure, plus hiring for its forward-deployed engineering team, which works side by side with partners, and its AI research group.

Why the Channel Matters for New York Owners

The pitch lands at a moment when small businesses are both leaning on AI and wary of it. A recent quarterly survey by the advocacy group Small Business Majority, cited this week by the New York City News Service, found that 80% of the roughly 200 businesses it surveyed are using AI to support operations and cut costs. The same survey found 73% worry about the accuracy of AI output and 72% about data privacy.

That’s the gap Hatz is aiming at. Most owners don’t want to evaluate a dozen chatbots, manage separate subscriptions, or figure out which employee pasted client data into which tool. An IT provider that already holds the keys to your systems is a natural place to centralize that, for better or worse.

There’s a free, do-it-yourself route too. The same report notes that New York owners can take AI workshops through the city’s Small Business Services department, the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce, the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce’s Go Digital program, and a Google.org-funded Tech to Table accelerator for food businesses. (We covered another free option, the Downtown Alliance’s AI toolkit, earlier this week.)

Questions to Ask Your IT Provider

Whether or not your MSP uses Hatz, AI services are quickly becoming a line item on managed-IT invoices. Before you sign up, ask:

1. Where does our data go? Which AI models handle our requests, and does any of our data get used to train them?
2. Who can see what? Can we limit which employees use which tools, and get a log of activity?
3. How is it billed? Flat fee, per user or by usage? Is there a cap so a busy month doesn’t produce a surprise bill?
4. What’s actually automated? Ask for a demo of a specific workflow in your business, like invoice follow-ups or appointment reminders, not a general chatbot.
5. Who’s accountable for mistakes? If an AI-drafted email or bookkeeping entry is wrong, what’s the review step, and who catches it?
6. Can we leave? Make sure prompts, custom agents and documents can be exported if you switch providers.

The Takeaway

Hatz’s raise is another sign that the next phase of business AI won’t just be sold by tech giants to big companies. For many New York small businesses, it will arrive the way most technology already does: through a local IT firm, bundled into a monthly contract. That makes the IT provider relationship, and the questions you ask it, more important than ever.