Building an Autonomous Enterprise for Real-World Services with Netic Founder Melisa Tokmak

**Elad Gil** (0:05)
Today at No Priors, we're joined by Melisa Tokmak. Melisa is the founder and CEO of Netic, a company that builds AI for different real-world services like HVAC, Petcare, a variety of other things like that, Roofers. Prior to Netic, Melisa was a Director of Engineering and worked on various aspects of go-to-market for scale.ai, and also has experiences from Meta. Welcome to No Priors, Melisa.
Melisa, thanks for joining us today at No Priors.

**Melisa Tokmak** (0:30)
Thank you for having me.

**Elad Gil** (0:31)
Yeah. Maybe we can start off by talking a little bit about your business and what you're building because I think that you're doing something really interesting in the real world and you're mirroring AI in the real world. Could you tell us more about your company and Netic and what you're focused on?

**Melisa Tokmak** (0:45)
Yeah. Netic builds AI to run millions of real-world businesses that keep the world running.
That means basically we work with large enterprises in essential services. We started in essential services.

**Elad Gil** (1:00)
What would be an example of essential service?

**Melisa Tokmak** (1:02)
Imagine a billion-dollar revenue home services companies in HVAC, plumbing, electric, or consumer wellness companies, like where you can become a member and really go do a lot of sports or different activities, hospitality, automotive, pet services across the board. So every single thing that you need to run your life or that you want to do are a good example. And a lot of these businesses are actually quite large businesses, and they interact with millions of end users themselves, usually that are consumers or businesses themselves. So Netic exists between the company and its customers.
So every single thing to understand the customer need or want, and match that with how can we even help that customer with the operational rules of the business and even deploy the services or the labor, all happens on Netic.

**Elad Gil** (2:02)
So basically, say a customer calls an HVAC provider, what happens or what is Netic doing for them?

**Melisa Tokmak** (2:09)
Yeah, so imagine that you are in the middle of nowhere, it's minus 20 degrees and your heat stops working.
So you first find a provider. And there are many providers, you want to pick the most trustworthy one and the one that you can get to because you are in a minus 20 degree weather. Maybe you have a kid or an elderly or something is not working.
From there, once you find a business, usually you can find these from aggregators or by search engines or in now LLMs. And you can reach out to the company from any medium you want. If they're using Netic, you can call them or text them or find them, like go to their website to do an online scheduler. It's Netic agents that talk to the customer. What kind of home do you live in? Do we have any of your records?

**Elad Gil** (2:51)
I see. So this could be like a voice call and Netic is actually providing the voice.

**Melisa Tokmak** (2:54)
Completely.

**Elad Gil** (2:54)
And then the reasoning around, hey, this person needs some help and we should deploy somebody out to fix their HPEG system.

**Melisa Tokmak** (3:00)
And it's actually a lot of the businesses we work with, this is why we started with Essential Services. The operational needs are very complex. It's not as simple as, oh, Elad's heat broke and now Melissa goes. Is it that actually what kind of even units do you have? What kind of needs do you have? Can we come to you? Is it something that we need to come to you today or tomorrow? What is your lifetime value as a customer? So should we be deploying the best person who can only work on, let's say, boilers or new age systems today or later? So it's actually quite complex to first understand what is the need from the customer.
Can this company service it? If so, who, when?
And to ensure that it is all optimized to create customer delight to generate more revenue for the company, right?

**Elad Gil** (3:52)
That makes sense. What is sort of like an incumbent version of what you're doing? Or what are other players in the market? Or how should people think about what this replaces?

**Melisa Tokmak** (4:02)
So let's go back. How do people do this today? Obviously, we are a two-year-old company. So before us, too, how were they doing that? So it's primarily with people. These companies are extremely large. And if anything, actually, they can't grow because they have to keep investing in people to think of any kind of growth. And for them, they're EBITDA businesses. Many times, they're actually owned by private equity. They need to care about their margins and what they make to be able to invest back in the business. The most important labor in the business is actually the people who are going to deliver the job, right? You want to focus every single thing to make your end customer happy because a lot of these businesses are also commodities. If you do not answer me, I'm going to go to the next one. Next search result on Google. Next result on like now, Chargability.