Hatz AI raises $24M Series A and plans to scale its forward deployed engineering team for MSPs
Hatz AI, which sells its AI platform to small businesses only through managed service providers, raised a $24M Series A on Nov 12 and says much of the new hiring will go to its FDE team, which works side by side with MSP partners.
New York-based Hatz AI announced a $24 million Series A on November 12, led by Josh Schertzer of Nadia Partners (a former Blackstone CTO), with Vestigo Ventures and The Private Shares Fund also taking part. Hatz builds an AI control plane that managed service providers use to deliver governed, white-labeled AI services to their small and mid-sized business customers.
The company says its active MSP partner count tripled over the past year and its headcount grew from 14 to nearly 60. The new money goes into its model-routing engine and internal engineering infrastructure, and into hiring across its forward deployed engineer, AI research and AI optimization teams. CEO Jimmy Hatzell told CRN the company plans to roughly double its workforce, with most hiring in engineering, research and the FDE organization.
Hatz's FDEs work with MSPs and their end customers to take AI agents and workflows from scoping to production. Its posted FDE role is based in New York City with about 50% travel. Hatzell also said Hatz is "tripling down" on training MSP staff to become forward-deployed builders themselves.
Why it matters for FDEs: this is another sign that the FDE model is moving down-market through the MSP channel, alongside Lyra Technology Group's program for its MSPs. It means more FDE jobs that serve small businesses, with a large share of the work spent enabling partner engineers rather than only building for one enterprise customer.
Source: www.prnewswire.com