telli raises $15M seed to run customer operations with AI agents
telli raised $15 million in seed funding to automate customer-facing operations with AI agents across voice and text. The company, founded by Finn zur Mühlen, Seb Hapte-Selassie, and Philipp Baumanns, has already handled millions of conversations for B2C companies including Sky, Viessmann, Enpal, and Vaillant.
Context from: Telli | Ycombinator
The decision it puts on your desk
B2C companies running customer operations across multiple channels and languages should evaluate whether AI agents can handle the tier-one volume while an AI coworker surfaces the patterns your ops team currently discovers through manual sampling. If you process more than 100,000 customer interactions per month across two or more channels, telli's customer list suggests the technology is production-ready for your scale.
B2C companies still struggle to run customer operations at scale. Customers expect instant answers, personalized experiences, and a smooth handoff across every touchpoint: phone, WhatsApp, chat, email, and soon personal AI agents. Delivering that consistently across millions of conversations is still incredibly hard.
telli raised $15 million in seed funding Monday. The company, founded by Finn zur Mühlen, Seb Hapte-Selassie, and Philipp Baumanns, has already handled millions of conversations for B2C companies including Sky, Viessmann, part of Carrier, Enpal, Vaillant, and Clark.
The new funding will help telli expand globally and build new products around the same mission: helping every B2C company run customer operations that are faster, smarter, and better for customers.
What differentiates telli from a growing field of AI voice agent companies is the combination. The platform has customer-facing conversational agents across voice and text. But it also includes Charlie, an AI coworker for operations teams. Charlie helps teams analyze conversations, connect tools, improve workflows, monitor performance, and systematically improve business outcomes over time.
Most AI voice agent startups sell a replacement for the customer service rep. telli sells a replacement for the customer service rep plus a new layer of intelligence for the operations team. The agents talk to customers. Charlie talks to the operations team about what the agents are learning.
Over the past year, that combination has proven itself at scale. Millions of conversations across some of Europe's largest B2C brands. The customers are not pilots. They are live deployments handling real volume across multiple channels and languages.
I think the customer list is the signal here. Viessmann, part of Carrier, is a global HVAC manufacturer. Sky is one of Europe's largest media companies. Enpal is one of Germany's fastest-growing climate tech companies. These are not startups experimenting with AI. They are large-scale B2C operations where customer experience directly affects revenue and churn. If they are running telli in production, the technology has cleared a bar that most AI voice startups have not reached.
The addition of Charlie as a separate product layer is also worth noting. Most AI voice companies focus entirely on the agent-customer interaction. telli is building a second product that turns conversation data into operational intelligence. That is harder to copy than a voice model, and it creates a feedback loop where better operations data leads to better agent performance, which leads to more data.