Phonely raises USD16m to scale AI agents that outbook human call centre staff
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The news: Voice AI startup Phonely has raised USD16 million ($22.31 million) in a Series A to scale AI agents that handle business phone calls in a way that 90% of callers can’t tell they aren’t speaking to a human, according to co-founder and CEO Will Bodewes.
The San Francisco-based company was co-founded by Bodewes and Nisal Ranasinghe, who runs its technology operations from Melbourne.
Phonely was born out of an AI research group at the University of Melbourne, and counts Australian customer service outsourcing giant TSA among both its customers and its investors.
The round was led by Base10 Partners with participation from Y Combinator, TSA Group, Etech Global Services and Engage CX, bringing total funding to USD19 million, the company said in a statement.
Three of those investors (TSA, Etech and Engage CX) are also paying customers. Engage CX drove more than USD10 million in insurance policy sales using Phonely in the first four months of 2026 alone, the company said.
According to the AFR, the raising values the company at USD100 million and follows a USD500,000 pre-seed round in May 2024 led by Y Combinator and a seed round in October that year led by 7BC Venture Capital.
What they said: Bodewes told Axios that Phonely trains its models to replicate natural human speech patterns, including hesitations, because most large language models were trained on text data.
“I think that you’re going to see 90-plus per cent of enterprises adopting voice AI in two to three years in some form. I’d be very surprised if that didn’t happen,” he told the AFR. “You are probably going to see a very significant reduction in low-level call centre staff, but companies will retain high-skilled call centre staff that need to deal with other systems and other people because it doesn’t make sense to automate that.”
According to Phonely, the platform costs about 80% less to operate than human call centre agents. The company claims one customer processes 60,000 calls a day and another replaced 350 human agents in a single month.
The sources: Phonely, Axios, The Australian Financial Review
