When Flai was raising its seed round last year, it was just a team of three people pounding the pavement to get car dealerships to use the startup’s software to manage phone calls, emails, and texts. But CEO Ari Polakof was already looking to a more agentic future, where Flai’s AI would handle far more.
One year later, that future has arrived. The startup is working with more than 10 of the top 50 dealer groups in the country, and its AI is being used to answer and engage with customers, run outbound campaigns, and schedule appointments — 50,000 per month — across both sales and service. This has led to a 20x increase in revenue, Polakof told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview.
Flai says this deep integration is helping the startup set itself apart from others trying to get car dealers hooked on AI. The growth is attracting investors, too. On Tuesday, Flai said it had raised a $27 million Series A funding round led by automation-focused firm Base10 Partners. The round included funding from dealers (Friedkin Group and Findlay Automotive), Toyota’s venture arm, Y Combinator, and First Round Capital.
Polakof said Flai’s growth is coming from customers who see the bigger vision of what is essentially an AI-powered customer relationship management software built from the ground up and tailored to the specific need of each dealer.
“Sure, we do answer the phone calls, but we’re following up with customers, we’re alerting the leadership whenever they need to take a look at something, maybe because the customer’s mad, or because you forgot to respond, or promised them something next week,” Polakof said. “We’ve grown quite a bit from just a phone solution to more of a platform. There are plenty of AI companies coming in, but I think that really speaks about the opportunity.”
Flai claims its software is also flexible. Earlier this year it launched with a luxury dealer in Puerto Rico where customers “switch between Spanish and English mid-conversation,” Flai co-founder Juan Alzugaray wrote in a LinkedIn post. “We started where we always do: inbound service calls. It went well enough that they added sales. And now the group is rolling Flai out across all 8 of their stores,” he wrote.
The result of all this is that dealerships are selling more cars, making more money, and “customers are getting answers faster,” according to one of the groups Flai works with.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Polakof said much of Flai’s customer growth has come from the dealers talking up the product to their peers.
“If you really do great by them, they also do great by you, and they recommend you, and talk about you,” he said. This has led to Flai generating half of its revenue from new customers
Customers are making these referrals because they like Flai’s software, Polakof said, but also because they get up and running quickly. Flai’s software can be live in a dealership 10 days after a contract is signed, and he tells his team — which is now up to around 40 people — that they need to respond to customers within 20 minutes “at most.”
“The common experience, especially around automotive [software] vendors, is — and many are almost traumatized by this — is that they sign the contract and then the company disappears,” he said “I’m fully focused on making sure that we treat every customer as if they’re our only customer, especially because I know how hard it was to get the first one.”
That speed and customer experience, combined with the knowledge Flai has developed on how dealerships work and what they need, is what Polakof said protects the startup from products like Muse, which Meta has pitched as a one-shot solution for small businesses.
“You get a group of really smart people, and you spend all your days, all your time thinking very deeply about this one space — it’s just so hard to envision that any other platform outside of the space can come in and start going after your customers,” he said.
For all this momentum, there is still one customer Polakof hasn’t been able to land: his own local dealership.
“I’m actually trying much harder than I should to make them a customer,” he laughed. “I’m sure we will get them by next year.”
