$15m · Seed · Software · Berlin, Germany
Berlin-based telli has raised a $15m seed round led by redalpine. Strategic investors and Mutschler joined existing backers Cherry Ventures and Y Combinator, alongside angels including Whirlpool chief executive Marc Bitzer, Adyen executive Alexa von Bismarck, former FlixBus and Lufthansa director Martin Koehler, and Paragon Partners' Krischan von Moeller.
The company builds AI agents for business-to-consumer sales, service and support. Its platform covers voice, chat, SMS, WhatsApp and email, while an AI coworker called Charlie helps teams configure agents, connect operating systems, review conversations, run experiments and improve performance. telli says its agents already handle millions of conversations for companies including Sky, Enpal and Vaillant.
The product is the operating loop, not only the call
Voice automation can answer or place a call, but telli's commercial claim is broader: it wants to manage the work around each interaction. A conversation can qualify a lead, book an appointment, trigger a follow-up or resolve a request; Charlie then analyses the result and lets the customer's operations team adjust the agent. That shortens the distance between spotting a weak conversation and changing how the system behaves.
The mechanism matters for enterprise adoption. Customer-facing teams rarely operate in a single channel, and their CRM, contact-centre and ticketing systems already hold the context needed to complete a task. telli therefore has to prove that its agents can connect those systems, hand unresolved cases to people and improve without turning every change into a long implementation project. redalpine says the platform demonstrated that loop by diagnosing a failed call, proposing a fix and succeeding on a second attempt using real customer data.
Expansion depends on repeatable customer outcomes
The founders bring direct operating experience to that problem. Finn zur Mühlen and Philipp Baumanns helped build Enpal's heat-pump sales organisation to 150 people in its first year, while Sebastian Hapte-Selassie leads telli's engineering. The company was founded in Berlin in 2024 and joined Y Combinator's Fall 2024 batch.
The seed capital will fund engineering and go-to-market hiring, further development of Charlie and expansion of the voice and multichannel platform, according to redalpine. The useful proof point will not be conversation volume alone. It will be whether deployments produce repeatable business outcomes across customers and channels while keeping integration work, escalation quality and ongoing configuration manageable. If telli can make that operating loop portable, growth can come from adding workflows inside an account rather than treating every new use case as a fresh implementation.
