Hatch expands into new markets through a faster integration roadmap with Ampersand

Hatch is an AI communications platform that helps home-services and home-improvement businesses turn every customer interaction into revenue. Its AI agents respond to customers by call, text, and email around the clock, from first contact through booked job, so businesses can grow without adding headcount. Hatch connects with the industry’s leading CRMs and lead sources, including ServiceTitan, Yelp, and Angi, and has driven billions in revenue for its customers.

Hatch’s early customers were in the contracting and home services space. Its AI agents effectively solved the “speed-to-lead” problem for these businesses, so every customer lead got a fast and accurate response. For Hatch, the limiting factor to growth was CRM integrations. Hatch’s AI agents require access to systems of record, particularly CRM platforms.

“We really wanted to get into roofing, pest control, and other adjacent markets, but those all have different CRMs,” shares John Peña, CTO at Hatch. “Building integrations across those CRMs would be key to this expansion effort.”

John faced three connected demands: maintaining existing integrations, configuring each new customer’s connection, and enabling agents to act across systems. With Hatch’s existing embedded iPaaS setup, maintenance occupied the time of all six integration engineers. They managed update schedules, authentication, and failed jobs instead of extending coverage, leaving Hatch with effectively zero new integrations that year.

Heavy maintenance overhead wasn’t the only challenge John’s team faced. Because each customer tailors custom objects, fields, and workflows to its operations, every new connection required bespoke engineering work, even for a CRM Hatch already supported. The work continued after onboarding because configuration changes could interrupt an established sync. “You have to pay very close attention to when the shape of the data changes in your customer’s system of record,” John explains. “Customers expect you to just understand that stuff, even without communicating it to you.”

The stakes rose as Hatch moved upmarket and expanded its calendar integrations. Hatch’s AI agents had to complete multiple actions across various systems, including retrieving customer information, checking technician availability and location, creating a calendar booking, and returning the outcome to the customer’s system of record. John needed a platform that handled two-way sync and per-customer complexity out of the box, while abstracting away the team’s growing maintenance burden.

John was already familiar with Ampersand from a previous role, and was confident its straightforward API and bidirectional action capabilities would support Hatch’s expansion with minimal implementation and maintenance work for his engineers.

John’s team began by rebuilding Hatch’s existing HubSpot integration with Ampersand, adapting a sample configuration file and deploying it through the command-line interface. Next, they embedded customer authentication in Hatch so businesses could connect their systems of record and start sending data. “The integration is something you could do in a day,” John explains. “You write a config, tell Ampersand to make it work, and you’re done with that piece.”

Following the rebuild, the maintenance burden that had consumed the team’s bandwidth disappeared overnight. John’s team no longer has to manage scheduling updates, authentication, and failed jobs to keep customer data coming in. Instead, Hatch receives updates as data changes in the connected system. The difference was especially noticeable with HubSpot. “We would have up to an hour of sync time delay,” John shares. “Now it feels pretty instantaneous.”

Once John’s team builds an integration, each customer can then install it and configure exactly how their data flows into Hatch. Customers select their own field mappings inside Hatch, and Ampersand applies those choices while preserving Hatch’s data model. “I want to think about my data shape. I want to build my own domain the way I see it fit,” John explains. “And then I want to be able to map customer data into that and then map it back out. So the Ampersand interface allows me to get as complex as I need to fit things into my shape.” This self-service configuration accelerates customer onboarding and reduces future maintenance work when the customer updates their schema.

For calendar integrations, Ampersand’s out-of-the-box bi-directional actions gave Hatch what it had been missing. Hatch’s agents can now pull the latest customer and technician data, book jobs, and write bookings and call activity back into a customer’s CRM without Hatch building the two-way logic itself. “Bidirectional sync is really hard to get right. When I read, I want to read what the customer wants me to read. When I write back, I have to respect their operational patterns,” John says. “You have to think about permissions and the workflows you’re affecting. I think Ampersand gets bidirectional sync right out of the box.”

With the huge reduction in integration maintenance and the ease of customer onboarding and support, Hatch is now able to focus on shipping the new integrations needed to break into adjacent home services markets.

With Ampersand, Hatch now serves businesses whose integration requirements previously put them out of reach. John’s team has built six new integrations to support that expansion, following a year when maintenance had effectively stalled new integration work. Engineers also have more time to improve the agents that handle customer conversations and book jobs.

Looking ahead, John plans to move more of Hatch’s integrations onto Ampersand and extend that foundation across its data-backed applications. His goal is to simplify how Hatch manages its integrations, giving his team more time to improve the product customers rely on daily.