telli

telli is a Berlin-based company building an AI voice platform for customer-facing call operations. Its agents handle sales, service and operational conversations for B2C businesses, covering lead qualification, upselling, reactivation and win-back, appointment setting and scheduling, reminders and follow-up, payment collection, data collection and surveys, proactive care, IVR and reception routing, and first-level support. Coverage extends beyond voice to chat, SMS, WhatsApp and email.

The platform is organized around a build-run-improve-scale workflow: a no-code agent builder (telli Studio), multilingual agents, a curated voice library with voice cloning, knowledge bases, and native CRM integrations with Salesforce and HubSpot or any system via API; runtime features including real-time in-call actions, post-call workflows, phone number management, contact management, live monitoring and smart dialing with retry logic and parallel dialing; analytics, call outcomes, recordings and transcripts, testing and A/B testing; and scaling to thousands of parallel calls with agents in 30+ languages. An AI assistant called Charlie supports monitoring conversations, analysing interactions, optimising agent performance, connecting internal systems and automating workflows.

The company describes serving customers in energy, real estate, medical products, home services, healthcare, financial services, insurance, telecom, recruiting and consumer sectors, and names Homeday (first-level inbound support), Enpal (appointment booking for sales representatives), Viessmann (follow-up for customer engagement) and Sky among users, with testimonials from Allright and McMakler.

Founding story

Co-founders Finn zur Mühlen (CEO) and Philipp Baumanns (COO) were employees one and two of the heat pump unit of German energy company Enpal, which they helped scale to 150 people in its first year, running phone-based customer acquisition on a call-center-like sales floor with hundreds of reps and thousands of daily calls. That experience with managing call performance, demand and workforce fluctuations shaped telli's product thesis. They were joined by Seb Hapte-Selassie (CTO), who studied computer science at Stanford and worked in software engineering at Pitch. The company was started roughly eight months before its April 2025 pre-seed announcement, with the mission of letting humans and AI collaborate in call operations.

Business model

telli sells a software platform to businesses that run high-volume customer calling operations. Companies build agents in telli Studio, connect them to their CRM and telephony (telli-provided numbers or their own via SIP trunking), and run inbound and outbound conversations at scale; the platform is also accessible programmatically through an API (api.telli.com). Positioning emphasizes measurable outcomes such as qualified leads, booked appointments and collected payments rather than voice generation alone.

Pricing is not disclosed in the available material; the company sells its platform to businesses and reported revenue growth of more than 50% month-over-month in each of the three months preceding its April 2025 pre-seed announcement.

Traction

By April 2025 telli had processed close to a million calls since its November 2024 launch, with more than 50% month-over-month revenue growth in each of the preceding three months, achieved with a six-person team in Berlin and customers in Germany, the U.K., Latin America and the U.S. Y Combinator lists a team size of 16. The company names Homeday, Enpal, Viessmann and Sky among users and states it serves hundreds of B2C companies.

Latest developments

In July 2026 telli announced a $15 million seed round led by redalpine with participation from Cherry Ventures, Y Combinator, Mutschler Ventures AG and angel investors, bringing total funding to more than $18.5 million. Proceeds are earmarked for expanding the engineering and commercial teams, developing the AI platform and the Charlie AI coworker, and supporting growth among B2C businesses adopting AI-powered customer operations. The company's careers site cites Sky as a customer deploying thousands of voice agents.