Telli is a German voice AI startup built around a clear thesis: in high-volume calling operations, the winning approach is humans and AI agents collaborating, not AI alone. Founded by Seb Hapte-Selassie, Philipp Baumanns, and Finn zur Mühlen — a team with roots at European scale-up Enpal — Telli set out to automate the repetitive, high-volume phone work that businesses struggle to staff while keeping humans in the loop for the moments that need them.
Telli's AI voice agents handle a range of call operations tasks, including automated callbacks, lead follow-up, qualification, and in some cases moving deals toward close. The platform is designed for industries that live and die by phone responsiveness — real estate, energy, healthcare, and financial services — where missing a callback or failing to follow up quickly means lost revenue. By letting AI agents absorb the volume and routing the right moments to humans, Telli aims to make calling operations both more scalable and more effective.
The early traction has been notable for the team's size: Telli reported processing close to a million calls for customers within months of launching in late 2024, with revenue growing more than 50% month over month, all with a small team. That efficiency reflects the leverage that well-designed voice agents can provide in calling-heavy businesses.
In April 2025 Telli raised a $3.6M (roughly €3.1–3.6M) pre-seed round led by Cherry Ventures and Y Combinator, with participation from leading angel investors. The company is using the capital to scale its AI voice agents globally and deepen the human-AI collaboration model at the core of its product, expanding across the industries where high-volume calling drives the business.