Phonely is a conversational voice AI company founded in 2023 by PhD researchers. The company builds AI agents that handle high-volume phone workflows, allowing businesses to qualify leads, book appointments, route calls, and resolve customer conversations. It is backed by Y Combinator and has raised $16 million in Series A funding.
The company's core technical work spans large language models, speech synthesis, and natural language processing. Its proprietary language model, Alma, was trained on over 10 million real phone conversations and achieves a first-token latency of 182 milliseconds - significantly faster than GPT-4.1's 490 milliseconds. The Phonely Platform integrates with existing business tools to enable real-time appointment booking, CRM updates, and workflow automation.
Phonely reports over 10,000 customers and handles more than 120,000 calls daily across 100+ languages. The company claims its platform reduces operational costs by over 70% for clients. Phonely operates from San Francisco, USA, and Melbourne, Australia, with a co-founder structure spanning both locations.
