Hatz AI Raises $24M Series A to Build Out Engineering Teams

Hatz AI has raised $24 million in a Series A round announced November 12, with the money earmarked for its auto-model routing engine and a hiring push that includes Forward Deployed Engineers and two new AI teams. Nadia Partners, Vestigo Ventures and The Private Shares Fund backed the round. Josh Schertzer, a Nadia Partners partner and former Blackstone chief technology officer, led the investment.

For employers and people-operations leaders, the announcement matters less as a product launch than as a signal about where AI talent demand is moving. Hatz plans to recruit Forward Deployed Engineers who work directly alongside partners, plus AI Research and AI Optimization teams focused on platform performance and self-improvement. Headcount has already grown from 14 employees to nearly 60, and the company is expanding its footprint in New York City's Flatiron district.

How does the company reach customers?

Hatz delivers its platform exclusively through managed service providers rather than selling directly to enterprises. That channel makes MSPs its route to small and medium-sized businesses, a segment where internal AI expertise is thin. The model shifts deployment, governance and support work onto an intermediary layer rather than onto SMB staff themselves.

The company reports a partner network covering thousands of MSPs across all 50 U.S. states, nine Canadian provinces and nine countries, reaching millions of SMBs globally. Its active MSP partner count tripled year over year, and revenue grew even faster than that, according to the company. Hatz has also issued more than 15,000 AI certifications to builders working with its platform.

Chief executive and co-founder Jimmy Hatzell framed the distribution strategy around trust. "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," he said.

What capabilities does the funding support?

The platform itself bundles several functions that HR and IT leaders typically evaluate separately when adopting AI tools:

• A multi-tenant control plane with AI governance, custom workflows and automated routing across foundation models.
• Access to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and other models in one place, with an Auto option that routes requests among them.
• Automatic tool selection drawing on web search, document analysis, data connectors and integrations.
• Administrative controls including role-based access, spending limits, usage visibility and audit logs.

MSPs can package those capabilities as AI-as-a-Service under their own brands and manage multiple client environments through the shared platform. On the compliance side, Hatz says customer data is never used to train outside models and that its SOC 2 Type 2 controls are independently audited — a claim buyers will want to verify during procurement diligence.

The new capital targets the auto-model routing engine, benchmarks and internal software factory infrastructure. Those investments raise the practical adoption questions any HR technology buyer should ask an intermediary vendor: who governs model selection, how usage and spend get audited across client tenants, and what happens to governance when routing happens automatically.

What is the track record so far?

The Series A follows Hatz's public launch on January 4, 2024, when it announced a $2.5 million seed round led by Vestigo Ventures — meaning the company has raised roughly ten times its seed amount in under three years. Co-founders Hatzell and Aidan Kehoe introduced the same distribution model at launch: a multi-tenant platform through which MSPs could build AI-as-a-Service businesses using AI applications, agents, vector storage and custom large language models.

The funding puts more engineering resources behind the intermediary model. Small businesses receive AI through their IT provider, while Hatz supplies the routing, governance and deployment support behind it. Whether that layer scales cleanly will depend on Hatz's ability to hire and retain the engineers it now plans to recruit, and on making the platform manageable for a growing base of MSPs and the business customers those providers serve.