Founder hub
Will Bodewes
About
Will Bodewes, CEO of Phonely and a PhD AI researcher, raised a $16 million Series A and is now hiring aggressively across sales, growth and engineering. He explains why Phonely is training its own models for voice AI, since the LLM drives most of the latency and cost, and why he thinks building something people love makes fundraising come naturally. In this episode: • How much did Phonely raise? • What is Phonely's advantage in voice AI? • Why is Phonely building its own models? • Does Phonely u
Best quotes
We just raised our series A and we've been really growing out the team, scaling it a lot. Seeing a ton of attraction attraction traction in the market and a lot of adoption.
Where a lot of our competitors are building you know, chatbots that talk, we've been able to build that two years ago and now we build AI agents that are optimized better than any other agent.
Fundraising is not a challenge, right? Fundraising is something that just comes naturally and so, I think that that doesn't mean necessarily oh, you need to spend all your days writing code and you know, being in the product and not listening to users.
The biggest problem right now is in voice is the LLM is where 90% of the problem is. It's where 70% of latency is and it's where 60% of the cost is, right?
Over the phone is a real-time communication pipeline. And so, a lot of the methods that these LLMs have been built for are not real-time.
FAQ
How much did Phonely raise in their Series A funding round?
Phonely raised a 16 million dollar Series A funding round.
What roles is Phonely currently hiring for?
Phonely is aggressively hiring for account executives, growth and marketing personnel, engineering roles, and a bring-your-own-role position for talented individuals.
Why does Phonely avoid doing outbound sales campaigns?
Outbound campaigns are avoided due to the significant legal implications and regulations surrounding outbound calling, especially in the US.
What makes voice AI different from other AI text applications?
Voice AI operates on a real-time communication pipeline where waiting 5 seconds for a response is unacceptable, requiring models to think and look up tools in real time.
Where can people find out more about Phonely?
People can find out more about Phonely by visiting their website at phonelee.ai or checking them out on LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok.
Episode
Related topics
Want the system behind these conversations?
Book a call with Charles. Sales, partners, or investors — pick the door that fits.
Book a call