Flai is the latest startup that brings artificial intelligence to auto agents

Silicon Valley is full of comfortable offices with shiny meeting rooms and Parista on the site. So when early Happyrobot Engineer Arie Pollacov decided to strike and start his own company, and he did not expect exactly that he would end on the laptop in the service of the service alongside mechanics.

“Very noisy, impossible to focus,” laughed.

But this is part of the story of how the new Flai company came out of the AI-For-Carhips from the Earth last year.

Founded by Polakof and his brother ALEN (also from Happyrobot) in Y Combinator, along with the former Netflix data world JUAN Alzugary, Flai is one of a number of startups trying to use artificial intelligence to improve the experience of buying a car or selling it or serving the car in one of the agency.

The participating founders built programs from A to Z specially designed for the automotive agency environment. It is “omni”, as Polakof said in an interview, which means that he can handle phone calls (using sound agents) as well as emails and text (using large language models).

Now, Flai closed a seed tour of $ 4.5 million to try to increase what it built. The round led Liz Wesl in the first round, and included financing from YC, Redblue Capital, Joe Montana’s Liquid 2, and innovation efforts.

Flai is not the only one who does this type of work. Earlier this year, another YC startup called TOMA announced that it had it A collection of $ 17 million Like A16z and Yossi Levi, influencing the auto industry known as Guy Dealerse Guy. A group of others is trying to build similar products, while the old interactive audio response companies – those that make the phone tree program that we are all familiar with – are looking to keep up with.

Pollakov, the CEO, said that the fly width is different in that he does not use ready -made audio technology. The emerging company has mainly built everything from the zero point, which made its voicers impressive sufficiently so that Pollaovs claims that it is already convinced of some traders to switch from other companies.

He said that moreover, there is a great room for competition in the market. There are thousands of car agents and service centers throughout the United States, and the majority of them have the same problem: they can lose potential customers if their phone lines are linked.

After leaving the ground last year, the Flai team realized the best way to train artificial intelligence, and start collecting customers, to appear in those agents.

Sometimes, try to contact cold, send an email, linkin messages, or even appear in the network conferences. But the largest part of the early work achieved by FLAI was from moving directly to brick sites and mortars-about 400 in those early days, through the number of Pollakov.

Once Flai gave these initial relationships, Polakof said it is mainly integrated with every merchant. This is how he found himself in the Gulf of Service last year – though, often this means only in an empty office.

Pollakov said that the Flai team spent “every day, throughout the day on the road” during that initial period. He said: “It is very tired and painful, but I think it’s the only way, and I cannot imagine a larger company to do so.”

With the start of the starting start from this learning period to another period focusing on grow Their peers in the silicon valley.

Fly’s seed financing will help grow, but Pollavv said that he does not expect the team to explode.

“We want to work smart as much as possible,” he said. “We don’t want to have 100, 200 people working on this now.” Instead, he said that the team of three men keeps each other “responsible” by focusing on the required tasks by 100 %, otherwise it is not worth it.

In this sense, Polakof is not far from those first days that work in the bay service or back office for sale – with less noise and lower mechanics.