telli Raises $15M to Build AI for Customer-Facing Operations

telli, an AI voice platform for agents that sell, support, and operate - across millions of calls led by Finn zur Mühlen, Philipp Baumanns, and Seb Hapte-Selassie, has raised $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 the existing backers Cherry Ventures and Y Combinator.

Customer communication is entering a new era. While businesses have long relied on calls, emails, SMS, forms, and WhatsApp, the underlying systems, CRMs, call centers, ticketing platforms, and manual workflows, have changed little, creating friction for both companies and customers.

AI is beginning to reshape that model. Consumers are increasingly using AI agents to compare offers, get support, manage contracts, book appointments, and resolve issues, with personal AI assistants expected to become another communication channel.

For B2C companies, this shift creates a new challenge: delivering seamless customer interactions across voice, chat, SMS, WhatsApp, email, and AI agents while maintaining efficient, scalable operations.

telli is building an AI platform that helps B2C companies automate customer-facing operations end-to-end. Businesses can deploy AI agents across multiple channels, manage conversations, analyze interactions, and streamline the operational work behind sales, service, and support.

At the center of the platform is Charlie, an AI coworker that helps teams deploy agents, integrate systems, analyze conversations, identify issues, and continuously optimize customer communication. The goal is to enable businesses to deliver AI-powered interactions while improving the operations behind every customer engagement.

Today, telli's AI agents handle millions of customer conversations for businesses ranging from SMBs to large enterprises. The platform supports use cases such as answering calls, qualifying leads, booking appointments, following up with customers, and resolving support requests for companies including Sky, Enpal, and Vaillant.

As customer interactions expand beyond voice to include more digital channels and AI assistants, telli aims to provide businesses with AI capable of managing conversations across every touchpoint.

telli has already processed millions of customer conversations for some of Europe's leading companies while developing Charlie, an AI platform designed to help businesses build, test, optimize, deploy, and manage customer-facing AI agents.

With the next phase of growth underway, the company is expanding its team across engineering, go-to-market, and customer operations to accelerate the development of AI-powered customer communication.