telli seed funding reaches $15 million for AI customer ops

Berlin-based telli has raised $15 million in telli seed funding to build out its AI platform for customer-facing operations. The round matters because B2C companies are under pressure to automate more sales, service and support work across voice, chat and messaging channels without creating a fragmented customer experience.

redalpine led the seed round, with Mutschler, Cherry Ventures, Y Combinator and several angel investors also participating. The financing brings telli’s total funding to more than $18.5 million. The company did not disclose its valuation, revenue, customer count or headcount.

telli was founded in 2024 by Seb Hapte-Selassie, Philipp Baumanns and Finn zur Muehlen. The company sells AI agents to B2C businesses that want to automate customer interactions across voice, chat, SMS, WhatsApp and email. Its platform is designed to let companies deploy agents, monitor conversations, review interactions and automate workflows across sales, service and support teams.

What does telli do?

telli builds AI agents for companies that communicate with consumers across multiple channels. In practice, that means software that can answer customer questions, qualify leads, schedule appointments and handle service requests, according to the company.

The startup’s central product is Charlie, which telli describes as an AI coworker for customer operations teams. Charlie is meant to help teams create and refine AI agents, connect company systems, review conversations, detect operational problems and improve how customer communications are handled. The company has not provided performance benchmarks for Charlie or detailed how much human review is required in production deployments.

telli says its agents already process millions of customer conversations for customers ranging from small and midsize businesses to large enterprises. It did not name those customers or provide a breakdown by channel, sector or geography.

The company is pitching into a crowded but active field. Customer support automation has drawn sustained interest from founders and investors as generative AI models have improved at handling natural-language tasks. The hard part for buyers is less the demo and more the operating layer: connecting to internal systems, preserving quality across channels, avoiding bad handoffs and knowing when a human should take over.

Zur Muehlen, telli’s co-founder and CEO, said the company is building for a future in which customer-facing teams need AI that can speak with consumers, work across communication channels and improve the operations behind those interactions.

telli plans to use the new capital to hire across engineering and go-to-market roles. It also plans to develop Charlie further, improve its voice and multichannel AI agent platform, and support more B2C companies adopting AI-powered customer operations. The company did not give a hiring target or a timeline for the product updates.

This story draws on original reporting from Tech.eu.