Former Y Combinator startup Telli is helping companies alleviate the bottleneck that occurs when a high-volume of customers try to, for example, book appointments. Its AI voice agents kick in and handle basic operations while handing off more-complex processes to human operators. The Berlin-based startup has now raised $3.6 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Berlin’s Cherry Ventures and Y Combinator.
Telli says its AI voice agents can perform a number of tasks, including automated callbacks and even closing deals.
The startup, which was founded by Seb Hapte-Selassie, Philipp Baumanns, and Finn zur Mühlen, has concentrated on making its agents blend into company operations.
It’s now claiming to have reached revenue growth of more than 50% month over month and has processed close to a million phone calls (and all with only a six-person team) out of the Berlin office. Customers are spread across Germany, the U.K., Latin America, and the U.S., with plans for further expansion.
CEO zur Mühlen told TechCrunch that the founders got the idea after working at German unicorn Enpal, one of Germany’s biggest startup successes: “We scaled the customer service people, and we saw firsthand how difficult call automation for customer acquisition is and how difficult it is to manage performance.”
He said that Telli’s AI agents “actually achieve outcomes like booking appointments, prequalifying leads, making product suggestions, and so on.” The voices are created by hired voice actors, whose voices are then cloned using the ElevenLabs or Cartesian AI voice-cloning platforms, he said.
The underlying AI models Telli uses vary between OpenAI, Claude, and others: “We switch around. Our goal is always to give our customers the best solutions that are out there right now,” he said.