Flai has raised $4.5 million to bring artificial intelligence into the heart of car dealerships, aiming to solve one of the industry’s most frustrating problems: missed opportunities when customers can’t get through on the phone. The company was founded by Ari Polakof, an early engineer at HappyRobot, alongside his brother Alen and former Netflix data scientist Juan Alzugary. The idea was born not in a slick Silicon Valley office but in the noisy chaos of a service bay, where Polakof first worked side by side with mechanics while building the platform.
From the beginning, the team wanted to create software designed specifically for dealerships rather than repackage generic tools. Flai’s platform is omni-channel, able to handle customer calls with AI-powered voice agents while also managing emails and text messages with large language models trained for dealership tasks. By building everything in-house, Flai believes its technology is stronger and more tailored than competing systems that rely on off-the-shelf solutions. Polakof says this approach has already convinced dealers to leave existing providers and switch to Flai.
The $4.5 million seed round was led by First Round Capital’s Liz Wessel, with participation from Y Combinator, RedBlue Capital, Joe Montana’s Liquid 2 Ventures, and Innovation Endeavors. This fresh capital comes at a time when the space is heating up. Other startups are vying for attention, such as Toma, another Y Combinator-backed company that recently raised $17 million from Andreessen Horowitz and well-known industry influencer Car Dealership Guy. Legacy voice response companies are also trying to adapt as new AI-first entrants push forward. But with thousands of dealerships and service centers across the United States struggling to answer every call, Polakof believes there is still plenty of room for competition.
Flai’s early customer acquisition strategy looked less like a traditional tech rollout and more like old-fashioned hustle. The founders personally visited more than 400 dealerships, embedding themselves in back offices and service bays to train the AI and show managers how the system worked. Those months were exhausting, Polakof admits, but they gave the team direct insight into dealer operations and helped them refine the product in real time. What started with cold calls and LinkedIn messages quickly turned into face-to-face relationships, which proved far more effective.
Now that the platform has proven itself in the field, the company is shifting from heavy road work to scaling up adoption. The three-person team continues to work long hours but is more focused on customer satisfaction and product growth than constant travel. Despite the new funding, Polakof says the team has no plans to hire aggressively, preferring to stay lean and focused. For now, each founder keeps the others accountable by prioritizing only the work that truly matters.
Flai’s story highlights how much persistence and grit it takes to bring AI into a traditional industry. From noisy garages to venture-backed scaling, the company shows how small, determined teams can compete against larger incumbents. With its custom-built technology and new funding, Flai hopes to prove that the future of car dealerships will be powered not by endless ringing phones, but by AI agents ready to engage every customer.
