This is Seb, Finn, and Philipp - the founders of telli. We started telli 8 months ago with the mission to let humans and AI collaborate in call operations. Today, we are announcing our pre-seed round of $3.6M led by Cherry Ventures and Y Combinator.
Since launching in November, we've processed close to a million calls for our customers, experienced strong demand across industries including real estate, energy, healthcare, financial services, and have assembled a fantastic team in the process.
If you are interested in seeing how telli can also help your business, please reach out directly here: https://hi.telli.com/hello.
If you want to become part of our team, we are hiring across roles here: https://careers.telli.com/.
Below we want to share with you a bit more background on telli, what makes the telli product special, and why you should be part of this journey either as a customer or team member.
Finn and Philipp were employees number one and two of the heat pump unit of Enpal, one of Germany’s energy unicorns, where we helped scale the business to 150 people in its first year. We found our perfect match with Seb, who studied computer science at Stanford and was an early engineer at Pitch.
At Enpal, we got to know what it means to build phone-based customer acquisition processes. We worked at the heart of a massive, call-center-like sales floor - surrounded by hundreds of reps with old school headsets and thousands of calls per day. That hands-on experience gave us an unfiltered insight into the challenges with phone-based customer communication 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 have poured that experience into developing a product that does not just produce a great-sounding voice demo, but that actually brings AI voice into real-world workflows that deliver outcomes. Beside our own insight, our collaboration with initial pilot customers was critical to achieve this.
The result is a platform that resonates with the market. In the last 3 months, we have seen revenue growth of more than 50% month-over-month each month primarily coming through inbound channels or referrals.
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. From day one, we designed the product around achieving outcomes - enabling AI voice agents to collaborate seamlessly with human teams to qualify leads, book appointments, and even win customers.
While working with initial customers, we recognized that the real bottleneck isn’t speech generation, but operational integration — making voice work reliably across thousands of calls per day.
telli’s approach leads to:
-Personalized conversations with the right tone of voice and accent.
-End-to-end automation with stateful agents that recognize callbacks, know when to call back, and trigger next steps or achieve outcomes.
-Higher reachability, thanks to smart calling strategies, automated callbacks, and phone number rotation.
-Real-time human-AI handoffs that ensure quality, control, and customer trust
We're building the AI call automation platforms where humans and AI work hand in hand - and we're just getting started.
None of this would be possible without the incredibly driven team behind telli. Now, we’re looking for more entrepreneurial, high-agency, and AI-native builders to join us across engineering, product, and commercial roles. If this mission resonates with you, we’d love to hear from you — reach out directly or apply at https://careers.telli.com/.
team telli