Today we’re excited to share that @useflai has raised a $4.5 million seed round led by @firstround with participation from @ycombinator @svangel , @Liquid2V, 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. 
After visiting hundreds of 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 has already handled tens of thousands of customer calls and is live in dozens of dealerships. 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. 
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.

Maybe part of this is that the eng team spent a lot of time building the right context for coding agents to know exactly what we do and how to best do it. Maybe the real opportunity is some sort of FDE-type startup that gets embedded in your business for months to build the perfect brain/tooling for everyone to use. Of course, this would probably only be worth it for massive enterprises at first, but eventually you can probably automate the whole thing. Same for consumers too. It would be extremely valuable, except most of us are too busy to even build the context in the first place and set it up right, and anything without the right context is not that helpful.

Coding with AI feels so far ahead of doing almost anything else with AI in terms of how powerful it is. Clearly there’s a huge opportunity in finding the right UI/UX to make AI be as powerful for normal tasks as it does for coding in Cursor / Claude Code. There are a lot of products trying this, but from what I’ve tried, nothing comes close yet.

Introducing Magnitude. It's a coding agent that runs entirely on open models. It costs 60% less than Claude Code with no drop in performance. Try it now: npm i -g @magnitudedev/cli Here's how it works 👇

There are 7 days left until we close applications for our next cohort. Some of the people you’ll be meeting: @pedroh96, founder of @brex @viccpoes, founder of @krea_ai @fernandorojo, head of @v0 Rodrigo Schmidt, first Brazilian at Meta @eliast, founder @agency @saradu, founder @andocorporation @victorcardenas, founder of @slashapp Andres Perez, founder Sanas. @APolakof, founder @useflai @RohanVasishth, founder of @getbluejay_ai @zacbakerr, founder @tryterac @abustamante, founder @bem_hq @Andydy42, founder @RespanAI @cvander, founder @platzi @pablorpalafox, founder @happyrobot If you’re in doubt, apply! The thing you’ll quickly realize in SF is that everyone is just like you, so please don’t underestimate yourself.

Just have to pick and win the right battles

Why Most Service Departments Leak Calls – And What Actually Stops It | Pre-NADA AI #5 Stream the full episode now, hosted by @samdarc: 02:27 What are Kissee Ford's operational challenges? 08:45 How can AI solve service call problems? 14:46 What is "The Flai Solution"? 20:45 What were the early AI successes? 21:53 How were vendor issues solved? 23:57 How did "Amanda" impact operations? 26:00 How was AI integrated at the dealership? 32:03 What are future AI plans?

Yesterday night at the @ycombinator F25 fundraising talk :)

We work every day all day for messages like this one 🥹

Flai in Times Square 🦅

Saturday with the Flai guys

There’s something very exciting about trying to solve what seems impossible at first

Congrats to @useflai on their $4.5M seed round! Flai helps automotive dealerships bring in more customers by handling all communication before they walk in the door — across calls, text, and email. techcrunch.com/2025/10/03/fl…

Congratulations to Flai on the seed round led by First Round Capital! The visited over 400 car dealerships in person to get Flai off the ground.

We are excited to partner with @APolakof and the Flai team! We were very impressed by the team's deep background in voice AI and their increasing momentum with customers, and excited to be supporting them with our friends at First Round Capital Liquid 2 Ventures.

So excited to share about my most recent investment!! The technical depth willingness to put in the unglamorous work that @APolakof, @alen0vich & @_juan_alzugaray have is a key attribute I look for in founders. In just a few months, the amount of product built and customer traction was crazy impressive. But most of all, I loved how these 3 engineers (ex-Uber, Netflix & HappyRobot) visited 450 car dealerships in person.  Since then they’ve generated millions in revenue for customers, with one customer saying Flai’s voice AI solution paid for itself on a single Sunday. Super proud to lead Flai’s $4.5M Seed round @firstround. Love working with this team — three of the most competitive founders I’ve ever met. Article on @techcrunch 👇

Happy Ari :p

Using claude code (cc) on a typical Saturday: me: can you do x cc: sure here it is (horrible work) me: can you do it correctly please cc: sure here it is (perfect)

almost last day at @ycombinator with @amiklas 🥹