telli Raises $15 Million Seed to Rival Billion-Dollar AI Giants

Berlin-based AI startup telli has raised $15 million in a seed round to automate customer-facing operations, pushing its total funding past $18.5 million. redalpine led the round. Cherry Ventures, Y Combinator, Mutschler and a group of angel investors joined in.

The check lands telli inside one of the most heavily capitalized categories in enterprise software today. Its closest German rival, Parloa, tripled its own valuation to $3 billion in roughly the same window telli spent closing this seed. Sierra, the category’s global leader, raised nearly $1 billion in a single round two months earlier. telli is betting that vertical focus beats raw capital. The numbers it now competes against are not small.

Redalpine Leads the $15 Million Check

telli builds AI agents that handle customer conversations across voice, chat, SMS, WhatsApp and email for business-to-consumer companies. The company was founded in 2024 by Seb Hapte-Selassie, Philipp Baumanns and Finn zur Muehlen. This seed round, structured in euros as a €13.1 million raise, brings total funding to more than $18.5 million.

The capital has four declared jobs. telli says it will use the money to:

• Expand its engineering and go-to-market teams
• Further develop Charlie, its AI coworker product
• Enhance its voice and multi-channel agent platform
• Support more B2C companies adopting AI-powered customer operations

Osborne Clarke, the law firm that advised redalpine on the deal, called it a signal for the European market for AI-powered voice and multi-channel agents. Sebastian Becker, general partner at redalpine, put the firm’s conviction in blunter terms. “The telli founders are the most technically exceptional and complementary team we’ve encountered,” he said, adding that “we strongly believe telli is in pole position to capture the opportunity.”

Two Enpal Alumni Aim AI at Their Old Job

The founding team splits along two very different resumes. Baumanns joined Enpal, a German heat pump and solar company, as employee number two in its sales division. Alongside zur Muehlen, he helped grow that unit from two people to 150 in about a year. Hapte-Selassie took the opposite route: a Stanford computer science degree followed by engineering roles at Pitch, N26 and BCG Digital Ventures.

That split matters because Enpal is now also a telli customer, one of the names the company lists among clients whose conversations its agents already handle. Asked by Tech Funding News whether having telli during his Enpal years would have changed how he built that sales team, zur Muehlen was careful not to oversell the replacement pitch.

We would have scaled more efficiently, but we still would have hired a lot of people

zur Muehlen, telli’s co-founder and chief executive, made that comment to Tech Funding News. telli has told the outlet its revenue grew nine times year over year for clients including Sky and Enpal, though it has not disclosed the starting figures behind that 9x multiple.

Millions of Conversations Across Six Named Clients

At the center of the platform sits Charlie, an AI coworker built to help customer operations teams construct and tune AI agents, connect internal systems, analyze conversations, flag operational problems and improve how a business communicates with its customers. It is pitched less as a chatbot and more as infrastructure for the entire front office: sales, service, support, appointment booking and account management routed through one system.

telli says its agents already handle millions of customer conversations for businesses ranging from small operators to large enterprises, answering inquiries, qualifying leads, booking appointments and resolving service requests. Named clients include Sky, Viessmann, Enpal, Vaillant, 1KOMMA5 and Clark, spanning telecom, heating technology, energy and insurance. Complex cases still get routed to human staff rather than resolved entirely by the software.

How Big Is the Market These Investors Are Chasing?

Enterprise conversational AI is a fast-growing, fast-consolidating category built on the bet that AI can now handle front-line customer work once done entirely by people, and investors are pricing that bet in the tens of billions of dollars. CMSWire’s reporting on the sector describes enterprise conversational AI projected to grow 192% by 2031 toward a market approaching $50 billion, with average enterprise AI budgets more than doubling from $4.5 million to $10.3 million as adoption climbed from 55% to 72% of companies between 2023 and 2024.

Europe’s own seed market has kept a brisk pace this summer, if at a very different scale. Berlin’s ARC Intelligence closed a four million euro seed round in about a week, while goNEON secured 160,000 euros to push an AI infrastructure planner to market. telli’s $15 million seed sits well above either, and still nowhere near the rounds closing around it in its own category.

Parloa’s Path From Berlin Neighbor to a $3 Billion Rival

No comparison cuts closer than Parloa, a Berlin company founded in 2018 by Malte Kosub and Stefan Ostwald that builds agentic AI for enterprise contact centers. Parloa raised $350 million in a Series D in January 2026, tripling its valuation to $3 billion just eight months after a $120 million Series C valued it at $1 billion. Total funding now tops $560 million. Its client list includes Allianz, Booking.com, SAP, Microsoft, Accenture and KPMG.

Kosub has framed Parloa’s edge as a channel choice made at the start: the company built for phone conversations first, while much of its competition began in chat, according to reporting by SiliconANGLE. That Series C round, before the tripling, came after Parloa quadrupled its revenue in the twelve months prior. Parloa now runs offices in Berlin, Munich and New York, with San Francisco and Madrid next.

Sierra and Decagon Show What Scale Money Buys

Beyond Germany, the gap widens further. Sierra, the San Francisco company co-founded by former Salesforce co-chief executive Bret Taylor and ex-Google executive Clay Bavor, raised $950 million in a Series E in May 2026 at a $15.8 billion post-money valuation, led by Tiger Global and GV. That brought Sierra’s total capital raised to more than $1.5 billion. Taylor told CNBC the round was about defending a lead he says is already commanding. “We are multiples larger than the next biggest,” he said, describing an aggressive plan to keep investing into a crowded field.

Decagon, a San Francisco rival founded by Jesse Zhang, raised $250 million in January 2026 at a $4.5 billion valuation, tripling its own price tag inside a year, according to Bloomberg. Data tracker Tracxn puts Decagon’s total funding at $481 million. Sierra says it aims to become the global standard for AI-driven customer experience. Set against telli, the four companies now look like this:

Salesforce and Zendesk sit in the same field from the incumbent side, folding AI features into existing contact-center software rather than starting from scratch, which adds pressure from above as well as from better-funded startups.

telli Is Betting Depth Beats Dollars

Funding tracker Seedtable read telli’s approach as a wager on distribution rather than model quality: a German-first go-to-market aimed at incumbent contact-center software that is weakest precisely in European B2C operations. That is the bet redalpine is underwriting, and it is a narrower one than the pitch Sierra or Parloa are making to global enterprise buyers.

The capital math around that bet is not getting friendlier. Venture analysis outlet New Market Pitch found that the three largest deals in AI customer support claimed 42.1% of category capital in 2024, 56.0% in 2025 and 90.6% in the year to date in 2026, with a narrower slice it labels AI Support Agents pulling 97.4% of that capital so far this year. telli’s next move, on paper, is straightforward: hire engineers, hire go-to-market staff, keep building Charlie, and try to turn a seed check into proof that a smaller, sharper platform can still win a category where three rivals just soaked up nearly everything else on the table.