The company behind Theo.
Damascene Labs is an engineering company in New York City. We build Theo, an AI voice agent for service businesses that live on the phone: the plumbers, dentists, property managers, and dispatchers whose next customer is one ring away.
Why we started
Damascene Labs began with a phone call that went badly. Forty minutes on the line with a telecom company, five transfers, and a problem that was never solved. Nothing about that call was unusual, and that was the part worth sitting with.
The technology to fix it already existed. What did not exist was anyone building it for the businesses that feel a missed call hardest. Enterprise call centres had every piece of it. A small plumbing company had a voicemail box and a hope.
So we built Theo: an agent that answers on the first ring, knows the business it is answering for, resolves what it can, and hands the rest to a person with the context intact.
From the founder
“I am an engineer. Sitting on hold that afternoon, I could name every piece of technology that would have ended the call in two minutes, and every one of them had already shipped. None of it had been put in front of the businesses that needed it.
That gap is the entire reason this company exists. I am not trying to take people off the phone. I am trying to make sure the call gets answered, and that when it needs a human, it reaches one who already knows why you called.”
How we work
Three commitments the product is built against, not slogans we hope it grows into.
We measure latency at every hop.
The call path is instrumented across nine hops, from the moment the line opens to the first word spoken back, with an average pickup latency of 0.74 seconds. A delay you cannot see is a delay you cannot hold yourself to.
Escalation is a feature, not a failure.
An agent that will not admit its limits is worse than no agent at all. Theo resolves what it can and hands off the rest with the full call context attached, so nobody has to start their story over for a person.
We build for calls that carry revenue.
For a plumber, a dental office, or a dispatcher, a missed call is not a support ticket. It is a customer who has already dialled somebody else. That is the standard the product is held to.
Talk to us
If Theo could matter to your business, or you just want to tell us how your phones actually work, we read everything that comes in.