Silicon Valley is full of comfortable offices with gleaming meeting rooms and on-site baristas. So when early HappyRobot engineer Ari Polakof decided to strike out and start his own company, he didn’t exactly expect to wind up tapping on his laptop in a service bay alongside mechanics.
“Very noisy, impossible to concentrate,” he laughed.
But that’s part of the story of how Polakof’s new AI-for-car-dealerships startup Flai got off the ground last year.
Founded by Polakof and his brother Alen (also from HappyRobot) at Y Combinator, along with former Netflix data scientist Juan Alzugary, Flai is one of a number of startups trying to use artificial intelligence to improve the experience of buying, selling, or servicing a car at a dealership.
The co-founders have built software from the ground up that’s specially tailored for the car dealership environment. And it’s “omni-channel,” as Polakof said in an interview, meaning it can handle phone calls (using voice agents) as well as emails and texts (using large language models).
Now, Flai has closed a $4.5 million seed round to try and scale up what they’ve built. The round was led by Liz Wessel at First Round Capital, and included funding from YC, RedBlue Capital, Joe Montana’s Liquid 2 Ventures, and Innovation Endeavors.
Flai is not the only one doing this kind of work. Earlier this year, another YC-backed startup called Toma announced it had raised $17 million from the likes of a16z and Yossi Levi, the car industry influencer known as Car Dealership Guy. A swarm of others are trying to build similar products, while legacy interactive voice response companies — the ones who make the phone tree software we’ve all become overly familiar with — look to keep pace.
Techcrunch event Join 10k+ tech and VC leaders for growth and connections at Disrupt 2025 Netflix, Box, a16z, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Hugging Face, Elad Gil, Vinod Khosla — just some of the 250+ heavy hitters leading 200+ sessions designed to deliver the insights that fuel startup growth and sharpen your edge. Don’t miss the 20th anniversary of TechCrunch, and a chance to learn from the top voices in tech. Grab your ticket before doors open to save up to $444. Join 10k+ tech and VC leaders for growth and connections at Disrupt 2025 Netflix, Box, a16z, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Hugging Face, Elad Gil, Vinod Khosla — just some of the 250+ heavy hitters leading 200+ sessions designed to deliver the insights that fuel startup growth and sharpen your edge. Don’t miss a chance to learn from the top voices in tech. Grab your ticket before doors open to save up to $444. San Francisco | REGISTER NOW
Polakof, who is CEO, said Flai’s offering is different in that it’s not using off-the-shelf voice tech. The startup has built essentially everything from scratch, which in particular has made its voice agents impressive enough that Polakof claims it’s already convinced a few dealers to switch from other companies.
Besides, he said, there is a lot of room for competition in the market. There are thousands of car dealerships and service centers across the United States, and the majority of them have the same problem: they can lose potential customers if their phone lines are tied up.
... continue reading