| Funding backs growing demand for always-on AI voice infrastructure in small business operations including dental practices, restaurants, home services, and cleaning businesses |
| Round led by infrastructure software founder signals confidence in operational AI, not experimentation, focusing on the growing revenue opportunity for AI receptionists |
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 10, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Newo.ai, the AI platform that turns customer conversations into revenue, today announced a $25 million Series A funding round led by Ratmir Timashev, co-founder of Veeam Software, and co-founder of OH.io.
The round brings Newo’s total capital raised to approximately $32 million, following earlier angel, seed, and SAFE financings. Participating investors include Aloniq, Constructor, Acrobator, and s16vc.
Across industries, Newo has found that small businesses often miss 20–40% of inbound calls due to staffing constraints and after-hours demand, representing a significant and largely invisible revenue opportunity. While AI reception has become increasingly common, reliably solving this problem in live voice environments remains far more difficult than it appears once systems move beyond demos and into real-world use. When it works, the outcome is straightforward. Businesses stop missing calls, recover 20–40% of previously lost revenue, and deliver a faster, more consistent customer experience without adding staff.
Newo provides human-like AI voice and text agents that answer, route, and resolve customer inquiries across phone calls, SMS, web chat, and messaging platforms such as WhatsApp, built specifically for production use rather than experimentation. A partner-first business, the Newo platform is designed for MSPs, VoIP providers, software companies, and agencies, the platform enables partners to deploy and white-label AI reception and customer communication solutions for SMB customers in minutes.
“Small businesses are under pressure to respond instantly, but most still lose revenue simply because no one picks up the phone,” said David Yang, co-founder of Newo. “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.”
Turning missed calls into revenue
The data suggests that small businesses leave about 62% of calls unanswered, beyond just losing revenue to unanswered calls they are also missing after-hours inquiries, and face limited staff availability. Newo’s AI voice agents are designed to operate as always-on front desks in real business environments, following structured workflows for booking, routing, escalation, and handoff rather than relying on open-ended conversation alone.
The platform is built to handle the realities of live voice interactions, from noisy call settings and ambiguous requests to zipcode routing and after-hours call answering, enabling reliable appointment booking, lead qualification, order intake, and customer support without adding headcount.
These capabilities reflect lessons learned through repeated production deployments, not theoretical design choices.
Today, more than 15,000 AI agents have been created on the Newo platform, with early adoption led by industries such as dental practices, restaurants, home services, and cleaning businesses. The platform is built to translate agent performance into measurable revenue impact, giving businesses visibility into how AI-driven call handling contributes directly to bookings and sales. Backed by a network of more than 200 certified partners, Newo doubled its revenue in the final two months of 2025 and entered 2026 with continued momentum as customer demand accelerates.
One example is Image Orthodontics, a multi-location Bay Area practice led by Harvard-trained orthodontists, which discovered it was missing nearly 20% of inbound calls during peak and after-hours periods. After deploying Newo’s AI receptionist, the practice captured calls that previously went unanswered, resulting in more than $400,000 in incremental revenue within the first quarter, driven by newly booked appointments and after-hours inquiries.
A key differentiator of the platform is Newo’s Zero-Hallucination Architecture, which powers its AI receptionist, AI front desk, and AI call center use cases. The system uses multiple voice and text AI agents to verify responses in parallel, ensuring consistent accuracy across real-world customer conversations. This architecture delivers sub-second latency, consistently human-like voice quality, and the reliability required for a phone answering service that businesses can trust to handle high call volumes.
Investor conviction behind the Series A
Ratmir Timashev has backed Newo across multiple earlier financings and chose to lead the Series A after the platform demonstrated repeatable customer adoption and growing inbound call volumes across industries.
“AI has reached a point where it can move from experimentation into core business operations,” said Ratmir Timashev, co-founder of Veeam Software and co-founder of OH.io. “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.”
Use of funds
Newo plans to use the Series A capital to accelerate product development, expand its partner ecosystem, and scale go-to-market efforts to meet growing demand from SMB-focused service providers. The company will also invest in expanding its AI voice capabilities across additional industries and use cases.
About Newo.ai
Newo.ai is a San Francisco–born AI startup building human-like AI Receptionists and Agents for small and medium businesses. Founded by AI entrepreneurs David Yang, PhD, and Luba Ovtsinnikova, the company helps businesses answer calls, book appointments, and drive revenue across voice, chat, and messaging. With a partner-first platform that launches fully trained agents in minutes, Newo.ai empowers MSPs, VoIP providers, software companies, and agencies to offer scalable, white-label AI services built for the modern customer. Learn more at www.newo.ai.
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