Slang

Slang AI (slang.ai) develops an agentic voice AI phone-answering platform purpose-built for hospitality operators, marketed as an "AI Superhost." The system answers inbound guest calls around the clock, responds to common inquiries such as hours, directions, promotions and allergy information, books and manages reservations, and handles private dining and catering requests. Calls it cannot resolve are transferred to staff or answered with a text message containing contact details. Additional features include VIP call routing to staff or concierge lines, real-time staff alerts for high-priority topics such as private dining, guest complaints and lost items, cross-selling of availability across locations within a restaurant group, and recognition of returning guests and VIPs.

The platform logs and tracks guest interactions and provides analytics on call volume, answer rate, reservations, covers, peak call times, common inquiries and guest satisfaction. Slang AI states it directly measures caller CSAT and reports 95-96%+ guest satisfaction. Voices are customizable, including a selection of premium voices and accents, customizable greetings and responses, and brandable background sounds. Official integrations cover OpenTable, SevenRooms, Tripleseat and Yelp, plus reservation, events and CRM systems. Setup is described as taking under 30 minutes, with same-day go-live.

Beyond restaurants, the company positions the platform for hotels and venues, and has said it will extend the product to multi-modal experiences beyond voice, including post-visit follow-up communication and personalized guest recommendations.

Founding story

Founder and CEO Alex Sambvani combined interests in food and technology, having cooked with his grandmother and won a global high-school robotics competition before joining Spotify as a data scientist, where he worked alongside voice AI practitioners including early Amazon Alexa team members. Living in New York, he encountered repeated difficulty reaching restaurants by phone and identified missed calls as a systemic revenue and guest-experience problem caused by outdated phone systems and overstretched staff. He partnered with former Spotify colleague Gabe to co-found the company, which launched in 2019.

Business model

Slang AI sells software to restaurant operators and restaurant groups, as well as hotels and venues, replacing or supplementing staff-answered phone lines. It provides a phone number and AI agent configured to each venue, integrates with reservation, events and CRM systems, and offers an analytics layer on inbound call data. The company publishes a pricing page and positions the product around ROI from captured reservations and saved staff hours.

Sold as a subscription software product to hospitality businesses; the company lists pricing on its website and reported over 6x revenue growth in 2022.

Traction

More than 2,000 restaurant locations use the platform, with a dataset of over 25 million calls from more than 10 million unique guests and reported guest satisfaction above 95%. The company reported over 200 customers and more than 6x revenue growth in 2022 at the time of its 2023 Series A. Reported customer outcomes include up to 20x ROI, a 2x increase in phone reservations, and up to 200 hours of staff time saved per month.

Latest developments

On 24 February 2026 Slang AI announced a $36 million Series B led by US Venture Partners, consisting of $28 million in equity and $8 million in debt, with participation from Thayer Investment Partners, former Stripe COO Claire Hughes Johnson, and existing investors Homebrew, Stage 2 Capital, Active Capital, Wing VC, Collide Capital and Underscore VC. Total funding reached $68 million. Planned uses include deepening the agentic voice AI platform, developing multi-modal experiences beyond voice, personalized guest recommendations and post-visit follow-up, expanding engineering, product and go-to-market teams, and growing the reservation-platform partner ecosystem.