The Future of Dealership AI – Live from NADA 2026
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NADA 2026 was a big moment for Mia. Fresh off a $20 million Series A raise (bringing total funding to $29 million), our Co-Founder and CEO Brian Hoang joined Kyle Mountsier of More Than Cars at the Mia booth to talk about what’s next.
This conversation isn’t just a product update. Instead, Brian explores how Mia powers a smarter communications engine for dealerships, one built to handle the volume, prevent missed opportunities, and give teams the clarity and capacity to focus on the customers in front of them.
Watch the full interview below.
Interview Transcript:
Kyle Mountsier: All right, I am standing here at the Mia booth here at NADA 2026 with Brian Hoang, Co-Founder & CEO of Mia. Oh man, I want to start off with this – well, first, thanks for joining us here today. You all just had some crazy cool announcements. Give us some insight into what just happened in your world.
Brian Hoang: Lots going on! We had a $20 million Series A recently that we closed, bringing our total funds to $29 million, making us one of the most capitalized companies in the space right now. We're dropping product updates left and right.
Mia's known today as the most customizable, realistic, human-like inbound voice agent for dealerships. Now, we're doing outbound communications, we're doing texting, we have the most integrations in the space. So, everything is accelerating really fast and we're really excited to see the impact that we're making for our dealers.
Kyle: I love a good founder story. So tell me a little bit about, like, what led you to enter the auto space with this particular tooling at this time? Obviously, you were kind of a little bit early on the AI come-up, right? I mean, people were dipping into it, but what led you to choose auto at this timeline with this product type?
Brian: Yeah, so we started in early 2023, so we were the first generative AI player in the space. And like the brief personal history there is, this is not my first rodeo.
This is my second tech startup that I've run. My first one was very different – sold to public safety – but ended up selling it in 2021. And coming from a family of Vietnamese refugees, it's like the first time I saw any real money. And so, naturally, I just went and bought a Porsche with it! And that was my segue into automotive for the first time.
I started a car community in Dallas – we're still daily active on Discord today, we host our own car cruises – and that’s what really brought me close to automotive. I realized this is not only one of the largest vertical markets and a pillar of the American economy and culture, but it’s also in dire need of meaningful automation and understanding your data. Make sure we can elevate and advance this workforce so they're not chasing leads – they're doing the higher-level priorities that the human staff should do: greeting people who show up to the showroom floor and the service drive.
Kyle: Yeah, I think you know, one of our big hearts for this year is we're calling it "The Year of the Human." And not because we don't believe that tech is going to be super important in this year, but putting tech in its right place and putting human in the right place.
How do you see pairing that on a day-to-day basis with so much of the automation, so much of the generative AI taking care of the – not meaningless, but menial maybe – work that can be done by automation and keeping the human in the loop? How are you pairing those two situations next to each other?
Brian: Yeah, so as an AI company, our first principle is that our role – not just in automotive necessarily, but in society – is to elevate and advance humanity. Right? And so it's all about how do we liberate this workforce from having to chase leads, the mundane and repetitive like you're saying. And so we always say that Mia is meant to augment your BDC. We automate what people currently don't want to be doing, and probably shouldn't be doing anyway, not at this point in society and modernization of technology and the consumer buying experience.
And so, like, we're really automating all this volume that the dealers have to deal with. All these calls coming in, of which you miss 30 to 40%. All these leads coming in, either organically or you're buying these leads, and 43% get mishandled. Mia is the first line of defense and now offense with outbound. Right?
So making sure that you don't miss – no lead falls through the cracks, and that we maximize all this volume going into the store. We're booking those appointments, converting all that traffic going in, so that your team is always stacked.
Kyle: All right, so what's Mia doing? And I'm seeing, you know, it's your AI dealership employee, the best employee there. So we're booking appointments, we're doing outbound... let's list down the things that we're taking off the plate right now.
Brian: Yeah, we're taking all calls coming in, and this is everything from answering general questions like, "Hey, what time does the service department close today?" to booking these appointments for sales and service. Being really like the front receptionist as well, triaging to people in the dealership as needed.
We're bringing a lot of rich analytics to the dealership as well. For the first time with Mia, dealers can understand how many calls are actually coming in, what are people talking about, what do they care about? And then if we transfer to a human, how are they doing resolving the task? What are the patterns here that they're starting to see for the first time? And so, we're very known as the most realistic voice agent, but again, we're really becoming this general communications engine for the dealership.
So it's not just voice, but it's also text. Not just inbound, but outbound as well. Mia reaching out to customers for you. You look at the records in the CRM or DMS – no matter how many people you have in your dealership, just mathematically, it’s impossible to touch everybody and give them a meaningful experience. The only way you do it is just "spray and pray" batch campaigns, and that's really not what the future of dealership marketing and advertising should be.
Kyle: Well, and I talk to some of the companies that manage reviews in our space, and the number one thing over and over, year after year, of any of the pain that has to do with a dealership comes down to communication. And we even see that in just general relationships.
Everything we're talking about is customer lifetime value, how do we keep customers, what does retention look like? Communication has to be at the center of that. And so, I love how you said "communication engine," right? It's the driver, it's the thing that keeps the heartbeat of an operation going. So cool.
What are you excited about this year? You've just got this funding, you've got some incentive to build, the pace around AI development, the models having larger context windows, there’s so much opportunity for people developing in this space... what are you excited about developing toward this year?
Brian: Yeah, I think the highest level theme here is the really exciting evolution we have: So far, we've been focused on automating dealership communications.
This year, we're starting to evolve from that to automating the dealership itself. There's so many disparate workflows and systems beyond just communications. And what we're seeing from all of our dealers is everybody wants fewer point solutions. They want a simpler tech stack. Traditionally, the dealer tech stack is very fragmented, it's very broken, and so is the data.
And so building out a unified tech stack and data layer so dealers actually understand how we're performing, what are all the little tiny levers we can pull to affect performance, and do all that with not, like, 20 different dashboards, 20 different opinions, having to manage all these logins. And so, being the one-stop shop for dealership intelligence and automation.
Kyle: Oh, "dealership intelligence and automation." I love that you're thinking that way. Brian, thanks so much for spending a little bit of time with us. I'm excited about what you are doing and congratulations on the funding and what you're going to be doing here in the future.
Brian: Thanks, Kyle. Thanks for having me!
Kyle: Yeah, absolutely