Telli × YC

Telli builds AI agents that run customer-facing operations for B2C companies , taking on the calls, lead qualification, appointment booking, follow-ups, and service requests that traditionally live across CRMs, call centers, and manual queues. The launch coincides with a $15 million Seed round, bringing its total funding to more than $18.5 million , led by redalpine, with participation from strategic investors, Mutschler and key angels, alongside existing backers Cherry Ventures and Y Combinator . The Berlin-based company says its agents already answer calls, qualify leads, book appointments, run follow-ups, and resolve customer requests for companies including Sky, Viessmann, Enpal, and Vaillant . The centerpiece of the launch is Charlie, positioned as an AI coworker for the customer operations team rather than another standalone voice bot. Charlie helps teams set up agents, connect systems, analyse conversations, spot issues, run experiments, and improve customer communication autonomously , and per the launch video works from inside Slack, Microsoft Teams, Claude, or ChatGPT. The framing behind the release is that standing up a first agent is straightforward, but turning millions of conversations into measurable business outcomes requires an operations layer, so Charlie is meant to give any company the equivalent of a dedicated customer-ops team from day one. Founded in 2024 by Seb Hapte-Selassie, Philipp Baumanns, and Finn zur Muehlen , the team traces its thesis back to operational roles at German energy company Enpal, where the founders saw firsthand how much of B2C growth still runs on manual dialers, ticket queues, and stitched-together dashboards. This launch matters now because voice and multi-channel agents are moving from novelty to core infrastructure for consumer businesses, and Telli is betting that whoever owns the workflow layer around those agents, not just the agents themselves, wins the category.