Newo.ai is a San Francisco company building conversational AI agents that serve as the front-desk operations layer for small and medium businesses. Founded in 2023 by Luba Rein, David Yang (PhD), Alex Novitsky, and ML head Viacheslav Seledkin, the company targets the universal SMB problem of missed calls and after-hours inquiries by deploying always-on AI receptionists across voice, SMS, and WhatsApp.
The agents handle appointment booking, lead qualification, and call routing, responding in sub-second time. Newo.ai built its system on Google Vertex AI using Gemini 2.5 Flash and emphasizes what it calls a Zero-Hallucination Architecture with automated failover, aiming to keep agent responses grounded and reliable for businesses that cannot tolerate fabricated answers to customers.
In February 2026 Newo.ai raised a $25 million Series A led by Ratmir Timashev, the founder of Veeam, bringing total funding to $32 million. The company also highlighted a distribution partnership with IONOS that provides access to a base of roughly 6.2 million SMBs globally, underscoring its channel-led growth strategy.
Newo.ai sits in the fast-growing voice-AI and SMB automation market, competing with other AI receptionist and front-desk products. Its differentiation rests on multichannel coverage (voice plus messaging), the reliability framing of its architecture, and a partner-driven path to reach large numbers of small businesses that lack the resources to build such systems themselves.