Berlin AI Startup telli Raises $15M to Scale Customer Service AI Agents

Berlin-based AI startup telli has raised $15 million in a seed round to expand its AI agent platform for customer-facing operations.

The round was led by redalpine, with participation from Mutschler, Cherry Ventures, Y Combinator and several angel investors. The funding brings telli’s total capital raised to more than $18.5 million and will be used to grow the team and further develop Charlie, its AI platform for B2C customer operations.

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telli is Simplifying Customer-facing Operations

Founded in 2024 by Seb Hapte-Selassie, Philipp Baumanns and Finn zur Mühlen, telli develops AI agents that automate customer interactions across voice calls, chat, SMS, WhatsApp and email.

In the last 20 years, the way consumers interact with businesses has not changed much. Most communication still happens through calls, emails, SMS, filling out forms, or more recently, WhatsApp messages. 

While the ways consumers contact businesses have evolved, many companies still rely on fragmented customer service systems built around CRMs, call centers, support tickets, dashboards, and manual workflows. According to telli, AI agents are beginning to reduce that complexity by managing customer conversations across multiple channels while helping businesses operate more efficiently.

For B2C companies, that creates a new operational challenge: serving customers across voice, chat, SMS, WhatsApp, and email—while preparing for interactions through AI agents—without adding operational complexity.

telli claims to be built for that shift. “Customer-facing operations are becoming too complex to run with the current tools alone. The next generation of consumer companies will need AI that can talk to customers, work across channels, and help teams improve the operation behind every interaction. That’s what we’re building with telli,” said Finn zur Muehlen, co-founder and CEO of telli.

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The platform helps B2C companies run customer-facing operations end-to-end with AI. It enables companies to build and deploy AI agents for tasks such as lead qualification, appointment booking, customer support, and follow-up communication.

The Next Step for telli

At the core of the platform 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.

telli reports that its 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, Viessmann, Enpal, and Vaillant.

“We’ve followed this space for quite some time, and the telli founders are the most technically exceptional and complementary team we’ve encountered. The value voice agents will unlock across enterprise automation is immense, and we strongly believe telli is in pole position to capture the opportunity,” said Sebastian Becker, GP at redalpine.

The funding will be used to grow the engineering and go-to-market teams, further develop Charlie, enhance the voice and multichannel AI agent platform, and help more B2C companies adopt AI-powered customer operations.

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“We raised $15M to double down on what we care about most: building a team of exceptional people and creating a product customers love that pushes the limits of what is possible with AI,” Seb Hapte-Selassie said in a LinkedIn post.

Main Image: Seb Hapte-Selassie, Philipp Baumanns and Finn zur Muehlen, telli co-founders. Image Credit: telli