{"id":189171,"date":"2025-10-04T09:00:35","date_gmt":"2025-10-04T09:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/189171\/"},"modified":"2025-10-04T09:00:35","modified_gmt":"2025-10-04T09:00:35","slug":"flai-is-the-latest-startup-bringing-ai-to-car-dealerships","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/189171\/","title":{"rendered":"Flai is the latest startup bringing AI to car dealerships"},"content":{"rendered":"

Silicon Valley is full of comfortable offices with gleaming meeting rooms and on-site baristas. So when early HappyRobot<\/a> engineer Ari Polakof decided to strike out and start his own company, he didn\u2019t exactly expect to wind up tapping on his laptop in a service bay alongside mechanics.<\/p>\n

\u201cVery noisy, impossible to concentrate,\u201d he laughed.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s part of the story of how Polakof\u2019s new AI-for-car-dealerships startup Flai<\/a> got off the ground last year.<\/p>\n

Founded by Polakof and his brother Alen (also from HappyRobot) at Y Combinator, along with former Netflix data scientist Juan Alzugaray, Flai is one of a number of startups trying to use artificial intelligence to improve the experience of buying, selling, or servicing a car at a dealership.<\/p>\n

The co-founders have built software from the ground up that\u2019s specially tailored for the car dealership environment. And it\u2019s \u201comni-channel,\u201d as Polakof said in an interview, meaning it can handle phone calls (using voice agents) as well as emails and texts (using large language models).<\/p>\n

Now, Flai has closed a $4.5 million seed round to try and scale up what they\u2019ve built. The round was led by Liz Wessel at First Round Capital, and included funding from YC, RedBlue Capital, Joe Montana\u2019s Liquid 2 Ventures, and Innovation Endeavors. <\/p>\n

Flai is not the only one doing this kind of work. Earlier this year, another YC-backed startup called Toma announced it had raised $17 million<\/a> from the likes of a16z and Yossi Levi, the car industry influencer known as Car Dealership Guy. A swarm of others are trying to build similar products, while legacy interactive voice response companies \u2014 the ones who make the phone tree software we\u2019ve all become overly familiar with \u2014 look to keep pace.<\/p>\n

Techcrunch event<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t|
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 27-29, 2025\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Polakof, who is CEO, said Flai\u2019s offering is different in that it\u2019s not using off-the-shelf voice tech. The startup has built essentially everything from scratch, which in particular has made its voice agents impressive enough that Polakof claims it\u2019s already convinced a few dealers to switch from other companies.<\/p>\n

Besides, he said, there is a lot of room for competition in the market. There are thousands of car dealerships and service centers across the United States, and the majority of them have the same problem: they can lose potential customers if their phone lines are tied up. <\/p>\n

After getting off the ground last year, the Flai team realized the best way to train their AI, and to start racking up customers, was to start showing up at those dealerships.<\/p>\n

Sometimes they tried cold calling, or emailing, or LinkedIn messaging, or even showing up at conferences to network. But the bulk of the early work Flai got done was from going directly to the brick-and-mortar locations \u2014 around 400 in those early days, by Polakof\u2019s count.<\/p>\n

Once Flai struck up these initial relationships, Polakof said they essentially embedded with each dealer. That\u2019s how he found himself in a service bay last year \u2014 though, he said, more often it just meant setting up in an empty office.<\/p>\n

Polakof said the Flai team spent \u201cevery day, all day on the road\u201d during that initial period. \u201cIt\u2019s almost very tiring, painful, but I think it\u2019s the only way, and I can\u2019t imagine a bigger company doing it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

As the startup transitions out of that learning period and into one more focused on growing and making customers happy, Polakof said the small team is still pushing long hours \u2014 like so many of their peers in Silicon Valley<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The seed funding will help Flai grow, but Polakof said he doesn\u2019t expect the team to explode. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe want to work as smart as we can,\u201d he said. \u201cWe don\u2019t want to have 100, 200 people working on this right now.\u201d Instead, he said the three-man team keeps each other \u201caccountable\u201d by focusing on tasks that are \u201c100% required, otherwise it\u2019s not worth it.\u201d<\/p>\n

In that sense, Polakof isn\u2019t so far from those earliest days working in a service bay or dealership back office \u2014 just with less noise and fewer mechanics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Silicon Valley is full of comfortable offices with gleaming meeting rooms and on-site baristas. So when early HappyRobot…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":189172,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,282,94684,94685,61,94686],"class_list":{"0":"post-189171","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-canada","13":"tag-exclusive","14":"tag-first-round-capital","15":"tag-flai","16":"tag-technology","17":"tag-voice-agents"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=189171"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189171\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/189172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=189171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=189171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}