Flai books 50,000 dealership appointments a month after $27m raise
A three-person team selling phone software to car dealers a year ago now says it handles 50,000 appointments a month and has grown revenue 20-fold. The round was led by Base10 Partners.
Flai sells artificial intelligence software to American car dealerships. It answers calls, emails and texts, runs outbound campaigns and books appointments for both sales and service departments.
The company says its software now schedules 50,000 appointments a month.
Chief executive Ari Polakof told TechCrunch that revenue has risen 20-fold in a year. He said the company works with more than 10 of the 50 largest dealer groups in the United States.
A year ago the company was three people selling door to door during its seed round. Polakof said the team is now around 40.
On Tuesday Flai announced a $27m Series A led by Base10 Partners, a firm focused on automation. Two dealer groups, Friedkin Group and Findlay Automotive, put money in, alongside Toyota's venture arm, Y Combinator and First Round Capital.
Polakof's account of the growth is that dealers recommend the product to other dealers. He said half of Flai's revenue now comes from new customers.
He gave two reasons customers refer: the software works, and it goes live quickly. Flai's product can be running in a dealership 10 days after a contract is signed, according to the company, and Polakof said he tells staff to answer 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 told TechCrunch.
The company has widened its pitch from call handling to something closer to a customer relationship system built for dealers. Polakof described alerting managers when a customer is angry or a promise has gone unanswered.
Co-founder Juan Alzugaray wrote on LinkedIn that Flai launched this year with a luxury dealer in Puerto Rico whose customers switch between Spanish and English mid-conversation. He said the work started with inbound service calls, then added sales, and the group is now rolling the software out across all eight of its stores.
The competitive question is whether a specialist survives the generalists. Polakof named Meta's Muse, pitched as a single answer for small businesses, and argued that a team thinking about one industry all day is hard to displace.
For a founder, the useful detail here is not the funding figure. It is the 10-day install and the 20-minute reply rule: Flai's own explanation for its growth is operational discipline in a market where buyers have been burned by vendors who vanish after signature.
One customer has held out. Polakof said he has not yet signed his own local dealership, and expects to get them next year.