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AI & ML · AI Agents

Telli × YC

Every customer call,
 handled by AI.

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About

Telli builds AI agents that run customer-facing operations for B2C companies , taking on the calls, lead qualification, appointment booking, follow-ups, and service requests that traditionally live across CRMs, call centers, and manual queues. The launch coincides with a $15 million Seed round, bringing its total funding to more than $18.5 million , led by redalpine, with participation from strategic investors, Mutschler and key angels, alongside existing backers Cherry Ventures and Y Combinator . The Berlin-based company says its agents already answer calls, qualify leads, book appointments, run follow-ups, and resolve customer requests for companies including Sky, Viessmann, Enpal, and Vaillant . The centerpiece of the launch is Charlie, positioned as an AI coworker for the customer operations team rather than another standalone voice bot. Charlie helps teams set up agents, connect systems, analyse conversations, spot issues, run experiments, and improve customer communication autonomously , and per the launch video works from inside Slack, Microsoft Teams, Claude, or ChatGPT. The framing behind the release is that standing up a first agent is straightforward, but turning millions of conversations into measurable business outcomes requires an operations layer, so Charlie is meant to give any company the equivalent of a dedicated customer-ops team from day one. Founded in 2024 by Seb Hapte-Selassie, Philipp Baumanns, and Finn zur Muehlen , the team traces its thesis back to operational roles at German energy company Enpal, where the founders saw firsthand how much of B2C growth still runs on manual dialers, ticket queues, and stitched-together dashboards. This launch matters now because voice and multi-channel agents are moving from novelty to core infrastructure for consumer businesses, and Telli is betting that whoever owns the workflow layer around those agents, not just the agents themselves, wins the category.
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<500KAI agentCinematicB2BGlobalUSFunding announcementFounder-led
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Nikhita Ravindran14d ago

B2C phone ops is such a graveyard of Salesforce plugins and Zendesk macros. Whoever untangles that mess deserves the seed and a medal.

Oskar Poltavets14d ago

Every AI voice demo sounds amazing until grandma asks about her insurance deductible three times and the agent starts hallucinating policy numbers. Curious what the fallback path looks like.

Marisol Quintero14d ago

That vertical video with the CRM-maze b-roll is doing heavy lifting in the tweet. Whoever cut it understood that nobody watches past second four without a visual gag.

Kenji Abukara14d ago

ok wait, B2C calls means home services, healthcare, insurance, right? That's basically the entire yellow pages, wild TAM if the agents actually pick up on the first ring.

Tomás Burke14d ago

How does per-minute pricing shake out against a Manila BPO seat at scale? The unit economics only sing if you're pricing on outcomes, not on tokens.

Amara Okolie14d ago

Genuinely asking, what's the TCPA story for outbound AI calls in the US? Feels like the compliance surface here is a bigger moat than the model itself.

Lenka Vávrová14d ago

Roadmap suggestion nobody asked for: let the agent detect voicemail and leave a callback-scheduled message instead of the usual awkward silence. Little UX win, huge conversion lift.

DeShaun Prewitt14d ago

hot take: within 18 months every call center RFP will have an 'AI agents' checkbox and half the incumbents will fake it with a Twilio bot. Telli's real moat is being early to the compliance conversations.

Yuki Shen14d ago

The tweet copy buries the lede. 'Maze of CRMs' is the actual pitch, everything else is just table stakes for anyone in this space.

Pavel Writesai14d ago

Hey team, any color on which verticals are live in production vs pilot? Working on a piece about voice agents in regulated B2C and would love a quick chat.

Finn Kröll14d ago

Portfolio pattern-matching this to a couple voice agent bets I've seen recently. The winners aren't the ones with the best TTS, they're the ones who nailed the handoff back to a human without dropping context.

Priya B.14d ago

been prototyping something adjacent for 3 weeks, guess I'm shipping into a knife fight now. respect to the team for actually raising instead of tweeting screenshots like the rest of us.