It was a concept that started in jest and a risky response to a job interview question, but Jimmy Hatzell, who launched Hatz AI this week to develop an MSP AI platform along with co-founder Aidan Kehoe, always knew he wanted to be a CEO.
Hatzell interviewed for a job at SKOUT with Kehoe, its founder, in 2018. “He asked me what I wanted to do with in five years and I kid you not, I said, ‘Well, I don’t really know what my role would be here in five years because I want to start my own company.”
Kehoe offered him a job on the spot, Hatzell recounts, with “the condition that we start a company together in five years and he could be a part of it.”
With that timing just about spot on, Hatzell, most recently VP of revenue at CyberQP, and Kehoe launched Hatz AI with the announcement this week that they received $2.5 million in seed funding led by Vestigo Ventures.
Investors include Alex Weiss from ClearSky, Matt Higgins from Shark Tank and RSE Ventures, Jim Brown from Long Ridge, Jon McNeill, founder of DVx Ventures and former president of Tesla and former COO of Lyft, Iqram Magdon-Ismail, musician, and Kehoe’s Nadia Partners.
According to Hatzell, the Hatz AI Platform will enable MSPs to help their customers use their own data, with their specific governance policies and organizational controls, to build large language models (LLMs, or generative AI) to analyze and improve their business operations. By building specialized AI applications and workflows and managing them through the platform’s multitenant dashboard, MSPs will be able to add AI as a service to their portfolio, a potentially new source of recurring revenue.
Hatzell says the platform is LLM agnostic. “In our platform we can use OpenAI. We can use open source large language models like Llama 2, and we can help MSPs to tune those models to be customized to their own companies.”
He explains, “It’s been an idea in the back of my mind for the past year as I watched AI really materialize. We started our full development build just last month. I have worked with so many MSPs and I know how things should be set up, how things should be architected, how things should be built. I’ve designed every single part of the product myself with the help of some amazing advisors and consultants and peers … and Aiden’s been a mentor for me ever since I started working with him at SKOUT.”
AI as a service is “a huge opportunity for MSPs to now move up from the reactionary layer of what we do, taking care of the [customer’s] infrastructure, to be more involved in their business and helping their business grow.”
Wayne Hunter, AvTek Solutions
Hatzell says he worked closely with Kehoe through SKOUT’s series B funding round and eventual acquisition by Barracuda. “Aiden brought me along for the entire step and gave me a look inside what it’s like running a SaaS company, what it’s like being a founder.”
Their partnership for Hatz AI “just made sense,” he says.
First Products Coming In March
Hatz AI plans to launch its first generally available products this March. The first release will include both an AI Application Builder and Organizationally Managed AI Assistants, according to the company. Later this year, Hatz AI will make its AI Phone Customer Service Agents generally available, as well as the ability to train and manage vector databases and custom LLMs inside the multitenant platform.
“I think we’re very early in generative AI for MSPs and SMBs as well, and it’s going to take some time to really find the best use cases and applications for this market,” Hatzell acknowledges.
Hatz AI will be leaning on its MSP launch partners, who “are really instrumental in helping us out, because they provide us feedback on the product and use cases and also pilot it with their customers. And we’ve also given those partners access to special benefits such as co-marketing and MDF campaigns that we’re going to be running with each of them and honorary status as our top initial partner tier,” says Hatzell.
Wayne Hunter, president and CEO of Allen, Texas-based AvTek Solutions, one of the launch partners, says he sees the potential of AI as a service to provide an additional source of monthly recurring revenue. It’s also an opportunity to embed MSPs deeper into their customers’ businesses.
“It’s a huge opportunity for MSPs to now move up from the reactionary layer of what we do, taking care of the infrastructure, to be more involved in their business and helping their business grow,” says Hunter.
Having an AI-as-a-service platform “allows me to look at how I can help a customer fine-tune their business flow, get to information and answers more quickly, understanding what’s working and what’s not working more efficiently. That, in the bottom line, means the customer becomes more profitable on what they’re already doing without having to add more resources.”
LAN Infotech, an MSP in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, is also a launch partner. CEO Michael Goldstein says he welcomes the opportunity to help with the roadmap. “I can’t say that we’re fully prepared for AI until we get a little further, and that’s why I thought this opportunity would give us the ability to have a sandbox to build some things and discuss it. … to at least see what’s going on, see if it fits for us.”
Partner Program And Pricing
Hatzell says details about the general partner program will be published in the next month or two.
Pricing for the platform has not been solidified yet, “but we’re working on a bundle offer that is affordable on a per-user basis for any MSP end user,” Hatzell says. Most large language models that you interact with right now are billed on a usage basis and we’re trying to work on a per-user pricing that has step-ups and a partner program where you get discounts on volume and things like that.”
The initial platform will be hosted in public cloud, but Hatzell says the company will have private cloud offerings later in the year.
Looking ahead, Hatzell says the seed funding will go into product development and launching into the MSP community. He plans to keep his staff small for the first year (currently they have four employees), leveraging AI and automation to grow.
Further down the road, says Hatzell, “I think that there will be a common set of best practices and collection and hygiene for training large language models for MSPs and we want to be on the forefront of that and helping the community as a whole build their own community-based AI.”
While it’s early days for generative AI, no doubt the race is on to monetize it. Hatzell is betting on AI as a service to be a moneymaker for MSPs. Time will tell as the Hatz AI Platform and likely other competitive offerings evolve from concept to product.
Hatz AI is currently signing up new MSP partners through a waitlist available on their website.
