telli raises $15M to build AI for customer-facing operations

Today, we are announcing our $15M seed round led by redalpine with participation from strategic investors, Mutschler, and key angels like Marc Bitzer (CEO Whirlpool; supervisory board member BMW), Alexa von Bismarck (Adyen), Martin Koehler (Investor and former director at Flixbus & Lufthansa), Krischan von Moeller (Paragon Partners) and many others alongside our existing backers Cherry Ventures and Y Combinator.

The way customers communicate is shifting

From our experience scaling the heat pump business for energy unicorn Enpal to more than 150 people in the first year, we have seen firsthand that business-to-consumer communication has not changed much for decades.

Most communication still happens through calls, emails, SMS, forms, or WhatsApp. Companies have adapted to these channels, but behind the scenes, most of them still run on the same stack of CRMs, call centers, tickets, queues, dashboards, and manual operational work, creating friction for teams and customers alike.

That is starting to change. Consumers are beginning to use AI agents to compare offers, get support, change contracts, book appointments, and resolve issues. Some will still use the channels they know. Others will expect their personal AI assistants to talk to companies for them.

For B2C companies, this shift creates a massive operational challenge. They need to communicate wherever customers choose to communicate — across voice, chat, SMS, WhatsApp, email, and soon via personal AI agents — while still running scalable operations and growing the business.

We're building telli to help B2C companies adapt to this shift

We help B2C companies run customer-facing operations end to end with AI. Businesses can build and deploy AI agents across channels, manage conversations, review calls, improve performance, and automate the operational work behind sales, service, and support.

At the center of telli is Charlie, an AI coworker for the teams closest to the customer. Charlie helps them set up agents, connect systems, analyze conversations, spot issues, run experiments, and autonomously improve customer communication.

With telli, the next generation of consumer companies can use AI that talks to customers, works across channels, and helps them improve the operations behind every interaction.

Trusted by leading companies to handle millions of conversations

Today, our agents already handle millions of conversations for companies ranging from SMBs to large enterprises. They answer calls, qualify leads, book appointments, run follow-ups, and resolve customer requests for companies including Sky, Enpal, and Vaillant.

We believe voice is only the beginning. As customer communication spreads across more channels and personal AI agents become part of everyday life, companies will need AI on their side of the conversation too.

telli's plan

We have the honour of working with some of the leading companies in Europe and have processed millions of conversations for them. Along the way, we’ve built Charlie, which we believe is the best AI agent builder on the market for helping companies create, test, optimise, maintain and run their customer-facing AI agents.

None of this would have been possible without the incredibly driven team behind telli. 

And now, we’re incredibly excited about the next chapter of telli! To help build it, we’re looking for entrepreneurial, high-agency and AI-pilled builders across more than 15 roles in engineering, GTM and customer operations.

Reach out directly or apply at careers.telli.com