telli, a Berlin-based startup building AI that runs customer-facing operations for B2C companies, today announced a €13.1 million ($15 million) Seed round, bringing its total funding to more than €16.1 million ($18.5 million). The round was led by redalpine, with participation from strategic investors, Mutschler and key angels, alongside existing
Rahul Raj
telli, a Berlin-based startup building AI that runs customer-facing operations for B2C companies, today announced a €13.1 million ($15 million) Seed round, bringing its total funding to more than €16.1 million ($18.5 million).
The round was led by redalpine, with participation from strategic investors, Mutschler and key angels, alongside existing backers Cherry Ventures and Y Combinator.
“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.
Founded in 2024 by Seb Hapte-Selassie, Philipp Baumanns, and Finn zur Muehlen, telli states that it helps companies move beyond their old stack of CRMs, call centres, tickets, queues, dashboards, and manual operational work, toward customer operations that are faster, more scalable, and easier for customers to interact with.
The company highlights the fact that for 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. It notes that companies have adapted to these channels, but behind the scenes most of them still run on the same stack of CRMs, call centres, tickets, queues, dashboards, and manual operational work, creating friction for both teams and customers.
But things have changed drastically with the advent of AI agents. telli states that for B2C companies, this shift creates a massive operating challenge. They need to communicate wherever customers choose to communicate: voice, chat, SMS, WhatsApp, email, and soon via personal AI agents, while still running scalable operations and growing the business.
telli claims to be built for that shift. The platform helps B2C companies run customer-facing operations end-to-end with AI. The startup notes that businesses can build and deploy AI agents across channels, manage conversations, review calls, improve performance, and automate the operational work behind sales, service, and support.
At telli’s core is Charlie, an AI coworker for the teams closest to the customer. Charlie helps them set up agents, connect systems, analyse conversations, spot issues, run experiments, and improve customer communication autonomously.
The company 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 company plans to use this capital to grow its engineering and go-to-market teams, further develop Charlie, expand its voice and multi-channel agent platform, and help B2C companies make the shift from software workflows to AI-run customer operations.
