AI call automation platform telli, announced today that it has raised $3.6 million in Pre-Seed funding, led by Cherry Ventures and Y Combinator, with participation from leading angel investors.
telli empowers businesses to make phone calls with AI voice agents, converting and engaging customers across the customer journey — solving a critical bottleneck in high-volume customer acquisition.
telli’s voice agents are already managing thousands of calls per day: booking appointments, making product suggestions, qualifying leads, and collaborating in real-time with human agents via integrated workflows.
In the last 3 months, telli has seen revenue growth of more than 50 per cent month over month each month - experiencing strong customer pull. With more than 80 per cent of closed customers coming through inbound or referrals, the team is expanding in and beyond industries such as real estate, renewable energy, healthcare, and financial services.
“We’d never want to go back to life without telli — it’s become an essential part of how our team works,” said Richard Ruben, CEO of KitchenAdvisor, a leading online kitchen platform.
“Our sales team can focus more on customers, we never miss a lead anymore, and we’ve seen a clear lift in conversion throughout the funnel.”
Founded by Seb Hapte-Selassie, Philipp Baumanns and Finn zur Mühlen, the team brings a rare combination of deep insight into call operations and Silicon Valley tech expertise. Finn and Philipp were employees number one and two of the heat pump unit of German energy unicorn Enpal. They found their perfect match with Seb, a Stanford-educated computer scientist with a focus on human-computer interaction who had experimented with AI voice applications.
At Enpal, Finn and Philipp worked at the heart of a massive, call-center-like sales floor — surrounded by hundreds of reps with old school headsets, thousands of calls per day, and pressure to perform. That hands-on experience gave them unfiltered insight into the challenges with phone-based customer processes that is shaping telli’s product: managing performance across tools and dealing with fluctuations in demand and workforce - all while building a great customer experience across thousands of daily calls - is very difficult.
“We know this problem inside out - we are redefining how humans and AI collaborate in call operations. This is a category-defining product from Europe with global ambition and a world-class team,” said Finn zur Mühlen, CEO of telli.
Within the last 5 months, telli has processed close to a million phone calls, this time with just a small 6-person team out of the Berlin office.
“We had explored voice automation for some time, but struggled to find a partner who truly understood the complexity behind phone-based processes,” said Christoph Pirkl, CSO at enerix, a leading solar installation franchise with more than 130 locations.
“The telli team really stood out not just technically, but commercially. They brought a ton of real-world best practices which made it easy to trust their approach.”
Just two months after its founding, telli joined the prestigious Y Combinator in San Francisco. Today it is serving customers across Germany, the UK, Latin America, and the US with plans for further expansion.
“telli’s AI voice agents are a game-changer for call-heavy industries and we’re thrilled they’re joining the Cherry portfolio,“ said Jasper Masemann, Partner at Cherry Ventures.
“Finn, Philipp, Seb and the telli team are unlocking enormous opportunities for businesses to automate time-consuming tasks and focus on what really matters—building meaningful relationships with customers and driving growth.”
The funding will further accelerate telli’s rapid growth as they redefine how humans and AI collaborate in call operations.
Lead image: telli. Photo: Beto Ruiz Alonso.
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