Telli raises $15 million seed for AI customer operations

Berlin-based telli has raised a $15 million seed round led by redalpine to expand its AI agents for customer operations, bringing total funding to $18.5 million. The company is selling into a crowded contact-center market with a pitch that B2C companies can automate more first-touch conversations across voice, WhatsApp, chat and email.

Cherry Ventures, Y Combinator, Mutschler and unnamed angel investors also joined the round. Telli did not disclose valuation, revenue, pricing or customer contract sizes. The company says revenue grew ninefold year over year, but did not provide the starting base for that growth.

Founded in 2024, telli is led by Finn zur Mühlen, Philipp Baumanns and Seb Hapte-Selassie. Zur Mühlen and Baumanns previously worked on Enpal’s heat pump business, where the sales team expanded from two people to 150 in about a year. Hapte-Selassie studied computer science at Stanford and later held software engineering roles at Pitch, N26 and BCG Digital Ventures.

That operating history is central to telli’s sales story. Zur Mühlen told Tech Funding News that if telli had existed during Enpal’s hiring push, the team would have grown more efficiently, though it still would have hired many people. His stated view is that humans remain better suited to relationship-heavy sales and product explanation, while AI can take repetitive, high-volume customer interactions that hit during peak periods.

What the product does

Telli builds AI agents for conversations across phone and digital messaging channels. It also offers an AI coworker called Charlie, which reviews calls and is meant to improve agent performance over time, according to the company.

The company says its agents already handle millions of conversations for enterprise customers including Sky, Viessmann, Enpal and Vaillant. Enpal, where two of telli’s founders previously worked, is now also a customer using Charlie to refine its own agents, according to telli.

Zur Mühlen described telli as an application company rather than a model research lab. He said the company is not focused on building underlying foundation models, but on using whichever model best supports the customer use case. Telli currently uses a cascading system of transcription, language model processing and voice generation. Zur Mühlen expects direct speech-to-speech models to replace that approach within one to two years, which he says could support use cases that are not practical today.

A busy field

Telli identifies Talkdesk and Aircall as incumbent telephony platforms it competes with, arguing that its AI-first product is built for sales and operations leaders rather than around human-agent workflows. Larger contact-center vendors such as Genesys and Five9 are also adding AI capabilities, although telli’s positioning against those companies is less specific.

Redalpine general partner Sebastian Becker said the firm had been watching the sector and viewed telli’s founders as a strong technical and complementary team. Redalpine has previously backed companies including N26, Proxima Fusion and 9fin.

The round comes about 15 months after telli’s $3.6 million pre-seed financing. Zur Mühlen attributed investor interest to customer referrals, expansion within existing accounts and the company’s Y Combinator experience. Telli also previously claimed more than 50% month-over-month growth at the pre-seed stage, without disclosing the underlying revenue.

For now, telli plans to focus on Europe before pursuing broader global expansion. The company has about 20 employees, according to the reported figures. Grand View Research projects the AI voice agents market will grow from $2.54 billion in 2025 to $35.24 billion by 2033, but telli’s disclosed metrics leave open how much of that demand it has converted into durable revenue.

This story draws on original reporting from TechFundingNews.