Phonely has raised $16M in Series A funding led by Base10 Partners, with participation from Y Combinator, Etech Global Services, TSA Group, Engage CX, and others. This brings total funding to $19M.
Three of Phonely's enterprise customers did not just renew their contracts. They invested in the round. When the businesses paying for your product also want equity, it says something about where the technology is headed.
Why phone calls still matter
Over $2 billion is transacted through phone calls in the US every single day. Yet the experience of calling a business has barely changed in decades: hold music, transfers, missed calls, and lost customers.
The call center industry faces 40% annual staff turnover. Businesses are constantly hiring, training, and losing the people who are supposed to be their front line.
Phonely sees phone calls differently. Not as a cost center, but as an opportunity to create standout customer experiences. AI makes it possible to optimize every call for an individual person. For businesses, that leads to more conversions than were possible with humans alone. For customers, it leads to faster, more accurate interactions.
What we've built
Phonely uses your website to create an AI receptionist that answers FAQs, routes calls, and books appointments, ready to go in under five minutes. The platform combines the best voice providers, language models, and transcription to create lifelike voice responses letting you scale effortlessly without ever missing a call or losing a customer.
Making AI sound like a person is only half the challenge. Customers want real solutions, and they want the AI to improve over time. Phonely builds a custom model for every customer, fine-tuned to their industry, terminology, and goals. Every conversation feeds back into the model, creating a compounding advantage.
The platform treats every conversation as a measurable, optimizable interaction, with built-in A/B testing that has shown a 5% conversion rate increase from changing a single question in a call script.
Real impact at scale
Phonely handles millions of calls per month across thousands of businesses. Here is what that looks like in practice.
"Phonely's AI agents are outperforming our human call center with 15,000 calls a day at a fraction of the cost. If you're not using Phonely, you're throwing money out the window."
Matthew Dillender, CTO, Engage CX
Engage CX has driven over $10M in insurance policy sales using Phonely in the first four months of 2026 alone.
"We have 4,500 human agents, and we didn't believe AI could match that level of conversational quality at scale. Working with the Phonely team, we've been able to create AI agents that resolve calls better than our best people."
Xander van der Westhuizen, Head of AI Data and Innovation, TSA Group
One Phonely customer processes 60,000 calls per day. Another replaced 350 human agents in a single month.
Backed by the people who use us
Three enterprise customers, Etech Global Services, TSA Group, and Engage CX, participated in the round. They use Phonely operationally and backed it with capital. That kind of conviction from paying customers is rare in enterprise software and reflects the measurable ROI the platform delivers.
Come build with us
Phonely was born out of an AI research group at the University of Melbourne, backed by Y Combinator (S24), and is now one of the fastest-growing voice AI platforms in the world. The company went from a $7/month first sale scribbled on a pizza box to an over $100M valuation.
The team is actively hiring across engineering, sales, customer success, and marketing. Even if you don't see a perfect fit on the careers page, Phonely is always looking for exceptional people who are excited about what they're building.
See open roles at phonely.ai/careers
Phonely's goal is to answer 1 billion calls by 2027.
If you want to turn phone calls into a growth engine, try Phonely for free at phonely.ai
About Phonely
Phonely is an AI-powered voice agent platform based in San Francisco. The company helps businesses answer every call with intelligent, natural-sounding AI agents that book appointments, resolve inquiries, and drive revenue. Learn more at phonely.ai.
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