Flai raises $4.5M led by First Round Capital to bring customers to auto dealerships with AI‑powered communications

If you've ever called a dealership to inquire about a new car or to book your 10k mile service appointment, you've probably been stuck listening to hold music and then bounced between departments. Or worse, you called after hours only to leave a voicemail which never got returned. That friction costs dealers customers and revenue. We built Flai to fix it.

Today we're excited to announce our $4.5M seed round led by First Round Capital, with participation from Y Combinator, SVAngel, Liquid 2 Ventures, Innovation Endeavors, and many other terrific funds and angel investors. This funding fuels our mission to bring customers to automotive dealerships by handling all communication before they walk in the door.

Unanswered calls mean lost revenue.

After visiting 450+ dealerships and speaking with service advisors, BDC managers, GSMs, and GMs across the US, the pattern was clear: missed calls, full inboxes, long hold times, and customers who don't try again. In fact, 70% of people who hit voicemail call a competitor within 30 minutes, translating directly into lost revenue for the dealership.

Flai automates customer communication with AI, starting with phone calls.

When a customer calls to schedule service or to buy a car, Flai handles the conversation instantly so no lead is lost. We're focused on the workflows that matter most—after‑hours and overflow capture, service scheduling, recall outreach, and sales follow‑ups—so dealers never miss a customer and every conversation moves toward an appointment or a sale.

With Flai, every inbound or outbound conversation gets captured, qualified, and advanced automatically, with always-on availability, support for any language, perfect memory of every customer, and zero hold time.

Dealers can also customize and tailor each use case to their own workflows, ensuring the platform adapts to how their store operates. Flai integrates with their Scheduler, CRM, and DMS, and supports multichannel communication across phone, SMS, and email so every customer interaction is covered.

We believe the modern dealership should run communications on autopilot so teams can focus on what truly differentiates them: delighting customers in the store and closing deals.

Tens of thousands of calls across dozens of dealerships in less than three months.

Flai has already handled tens of thousands of customer calls and is live in dozens of dealerships, collaborating with forward‑thinking groups like Findlay Auto Group and New Century Auto Group. Some dealers have told us Flai has paid for itself on a single Sunday and we've generated millions in revenue in the last two months. For our biggest location, we're generating about 150k in revenue each month.

The team to help dealers never miss a customer.

With this funding, we're pushing the product to new levels to build the AI communications platform for auto dealerships where every customer interaction outside of the store is taken care of. Never miss a customer. Never waste a call.

Our team is built for this. We started Flai as an idea for Y Combinator and left our roles at Uber, Netflix, and HappyRobot to pursue it full-time. Ari was the founding and second engineer at HappyRobot; Alen built infrastructure at Uber; Juan worked in data and analytics at Netflix. We're experts in building reliable, human-like voice AI and the systems that make it dependable at scale. We've now brought that experience to automotive, tailoring Flai to the realities of dealership workflows where reliability and trust matter most.