{"id":23542,"date":"2025-04-16T02:00:08","date_gmt":"2025-04-16T02:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/23542\/"},"modified":"2025-04-16T02:00:08","modified_gmt":"2025-04-16T02:00:08","slug":"telli-a-yc-alum-raises-pre-seed-funding-for-its-ai-voice-agents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/23542\/","title":{"rendered":"Telli, a YC alum, raises pre-seed funding for its AI voice agents"},"content":{"rendered":"<p id=\"speakable-summary\" class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Former Y Combinator startup <a href=\"http:\/\/www.telli.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">Telli<\/a> 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\u00a0round led by Berlin\u2019s Cherry Ventures and Y Combinator.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Telli\u00a0says its AI voice agents can perform a number of tasks, including automated callbacks and even closing deals.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The startup, which was founded by\u00a0Seb Hapte-Selassie, Philipp Baumanns, and Finn zur M\u00fchlen, has concentrated on making its agents blend into company operations.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It\u2019s 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.\u00a0Customers are spread across Germany, the U.K., Latin America, and the U.S., with plans for further expansion.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">CEO zur M\u00fchlen told TechCrunch that the founders got the idea after working at German unicorn Enpal, one of Germany\u2019s biggest startup successes: \u201cWe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He said that Telli\u2019s AI agents \u201cactually achieve outcomes like booking appointments, prequalifying leads, making product suggestions, and so on.\u201d The voices are created by hired voice actors, whose voices are then cloned using the ElevenLabs or Cartesian AI voice-cloning platforms, he said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The underlying AI models Telli uses vary between OpenAI, Claude, and others: \u201cWe switch around. Our goal is always to give our customers the best solutions that are out there right now,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Former Y Combinator startup Telli is helping companies alleviate the bottleneck that occurs when a high-volume of customers&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23543,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3163],"tags":[323,1942,14752,53,16,15,14753,14754],"class_list":{"0":"post-23542","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-cherry-ventures","11":"tag-technology","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-voice-agents","15":"tag-y-combinator"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23542","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23542"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23542\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23543"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}