Silicon Valley is full of comfortable offices with shiny meeting rooms and bartender. Thus, when early Happy Engineer Ari Polakof decided to hit and start his own company, he didn’t just expect to finish his laptop in a service bay with engineering.
“Very noisy, impossible to concentrate,” he laughed.
But this is part of the story about how the new start of Polakof-for-car-dealership Flame He left the ground last year.
Founded by Polakof and his brother Alen (also by Happyrobot) at Y Combinator, along with former scientist Data Netflix Juan Alzugaray, Flai is one of the newcomers trying to use artificial intelligence to improve the experience of market or service.
Co -founders have created ground software that is specially adapted to the car dealership environment. And it is “Omni-channel”, as Polakof said in an interview, which means he can handle phone calls (using vocalists) as well as emails and texts (using large linguistic models).
Now, Flai has closed a $ 4.5 million seed round to try to increase what they have built. The round was driven by Liz Wessel to the first Capital Round and included funding by YC, Redblue Capital, Joe Montana’s Liquid 2 businesses and innovation efforts.
Flai is not all that does this kind of work. Earlier this year, another startup supported by YC called Toma announced that it had raised $ 17 million from the A16Z and Yossi Levi, the influence of the automotive industry known as the Guy Dealership Car. A flock of others are trying to build similar products, while the inheritances of interactive vocal response companies – those who make the phone software that we are all familiar with – are looking to maintain the pace.
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Polakof, who is Managing Director, said Flai’s offer is different in not using off-the-shelf voice technology. The start has essentially built everything from scratch, which in particular has made its vocal agents impressive enough for Polakof claims that some traders are already convinced to go from other companies.
Besides, he said, there is a lot of room for market competition. There are thousands of car dealers and service centers in all the United States and the majority of them have the same problem: they can lose potential customers if their telephone lines are tied.
After leaving the ground last year, the Flai team realized the best way to train their AI and start hitting customers, was starting to appear in these delegations.
Sometimes they tried cold by calling or messages emails or LinkedIn messages or even appear in network conferences. But most of the early Flai project was done was from going straight to brick and mortar sites 400 in those early days, from the Polakof Count.
As soon as Flai hit these initial relationships, Polakof said he was essentially incorporated into each representative. This is how he was in a service bay last year – but he said, more often he just meant to settle in a blank office.
Polakof said the Flai team spent “every day, all day on the road” during this original period. “It’s almost very tiring, painful, but I think it’s the only way and I can’t imagine that a bigger company does it,” he said.
As starting moves from this period of learning and in yet another focus on growth and making customers happy, Polakof said the small group is still pushing for many hours – as many of them Her classmates at Silicon Valley.
Seed funding will help Flai grow, but Polakof said he is not expecting the team to explode.
“We want to work as smart as we can,” he said. “We don’t want to have 100, 200 people working on it now.” Instead, he said that the team of three maintains each other “responsible” by focusing on duties that “require 100%, otherwise it is not worth it”.
In this sense, Polakof is not so far from the first few days working on a back of the vagina or dealership – only with less noise and less engineers.
