Berlin-based startup Telli, a former Y Combinator participant. Has secured $3.6 million in pre-seed funding to expand its AI-powered voice agents designed to streamline customer service operations. The funding round was led by Cherry Ventures and supported by Y Combinator. Signaling investor confidence in Telli’s approach to automating high-volume customer interactions.
Telli was founded by Seb Hapte-Selassie, Philipp Baumanns, and Finn zur Mühlen, who previously worked together at German unicorn Enpal. Their firsthand experience managing scaled customer service teams led them to a simple insight. Automating voice-based customer acquisition is not just difficult, it’s broken. Telli was built to fix that.
The company’s AI agents are engineered to perform tasks like booking appointments, conducting automated callbacks, qualifying leads, and even closing sales. Unlike traditional bots, Telli’s AI agents are trained to hand off complex queries to human operators, offering a hybrid approach that boosts efficiency while preserving the human touch.
Telli’s proprietary voice agents are based on voice clones created using ElevenLabs and Cartesian AI. These voices, modeled from professional voice actors, aim to sound natural and context-aware in real-time conversations. The startup’s tech stack leverages large language models from OpenAI, Claude, and others, choosing dynamically based on customer needs.
Operating with a lean six-person team, Telli claims to be growing rapidly, with over 50% revenue growth month-over-month and nearly one million phone calls processed to date. Their customer base spans Germany, the U.K., Latin America, and the U.S., with ambitions for broader international reach.
As companies face growing challenges in managing customer engagement, Telli positions itself as a future-forward solution bridging automation and personalization in voice-based customer service.
