Dentists, restaurants, and home service businesses often lose money when calls go unanswered, with 62% of calls ending up in voicemail. While voice bots perform well in tests, they often struggle with real-world issues such as accents, noise, and unclear questions.
Newo.ai provides a platform where AI receptionists are always available to handle calls, SMS, and WhatsApp messages. The system can book appointments, qualify leads, and pass on calls when needed. It runs on Google Vertex AI and uses Gemini 2.5 Flash for fast, natural-sounding replies.
Early results show that revenue doubled in late 2025, with more than 15,000 agents in use. Image Orthodontics made an extra $400,000 in one quarter by catching missed bookings after hours. A new partnership with IONOS now gives 6.2 million SMBs worldwide access to the platform.
Today, the San Francisco startup recently secured $25 million in Series A funding, led by Ratmir Timashev, founder of Veeam. The company’s total funding is now $32 million.
Making voice technology part of business infrastructure
Newo.ai, co-founded in 2023 by Luba Rein, alongside David Yang, PhD, Alex Novitsky, and Viacheslav Seledkin, Head of ML, aims to turn voice into infrastructure.
Rein shares with TFN, “Newo was created to solve a clear and widespread market problem: small businesses consistently miss a significant share of inbound customer calls during peak hours and outside business hours, resulting in lost revenue and poor customer experience.”
At the heart of Newo’s technology is its Zero-Hallucination Architecture, which uses multiple agents to check both voice and text to ensure high accuracy. Structured workflows like zip code routing, clear escalation steps, and strong data parsing make it more reliable than open-ended chat systems.
Rein elaborates, “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. It features Automatic Failover to a Backup Voice and Reasoning LLM Stack triggered upon degradation detection to ensure uninterrupted booking intake and consistently fast response times.”
“The technology can be ‘hired, ‘ meaning it seamlessly plugs into existing processes using the same phone number the business is using, email, booking calendar, crm system, Meta messengers, escalating to a human team when needed,” Rein adds.
Key features include responses in less than a second, natural-sounding voices powered by Gemini Native Audio, and over 200 certified partner deployments. Agencies working with SMBs can see measurable gains, such as 15-20% more revenue from answered calls.
Rein notes, “Another key differentiator is Newo’s white-label, partner-first distribution model. Rather than selling directly to individual businesses at scale, Newo enables telecommunications providers, web hosting companies, software platforms, and agencies to embed and offer AI reception capabilities under their own brand.”
Direct competitors like Bland.ai and Vapi.ai do well in demos but struggle in real-world situations. Retell.ai and Play.ai lack the same partner reach or safety measures. Newo aims for strong, reliable solutions rather than just surface-level features.
“Newo’s differentiation lies in its focus on reliability at scale, white-label distribution, and horizontal applicability across small and medium-sized business industries. Many alternatives perform well in controlled demos but struggle in live production environments where accuracy, latency, and trust are non-negotiable,” explains Rein.
What about diversity, and what is it like being female in tech?
On diversity, Rein notes, “As an early-stage, fast-scaling company, Newo prioritises building diverse, globally distributed teams, with staff based across North America and Europe, including an office in Barcelona, Spain, alongside its Silicon Valley headquarters. We have employees from 27 countries, and multiple states across the US.”
On being female in tech, Rein shares, “Being a woman in tech without a technical background initially felt like a double disadvantage, but I discovered my superpower: translating complex AI technology into business impact language that small and medium business owners actually understand. “
She adds, “While technical co-founders excel at engineering decisions, my non-technical background helps me see products through customers’ eyes—and that’s where many technical founders struggle. My advice: lean into your unique strengths, stay curious enough to ask smart questions, and keep customer experience as your North Star. It still fascinates me that in 2024, companies with only female founders received just 1% of venture capital, down from 2% the previous year, yet research shows female-founded companies generate 78 cents in revenue per dollar invested, compared to 31 cents for male-founded companies. The tech industry doesn’t need more people fitting the same mould—it needs diversity of thought.”
What’s ahead for Newo.ai?
The new funding will help Newo.ai expand its products into more industries, grow its partner network past 200, and launch new efforts to reach service providers. The company also plans to deepen its integration with Gemini for more complex workflows.
Rein concludes, “Building trust is critical with the rise of AI and in a world filled with divisiveness. Verbal conversations are a cornerstone of building trust. The need for an authentic, real conversation to build a connection between people and small businesses will only increase in importance. Newo will create a million AI agents that bridge this gap for businesses around the world across many languages and cultures.”
