Bland AI: Automating phone calls for enterprises with AI

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Hi 👋, this is the Today in AI Newsletter: The weekly newsletter bringing you one step closer to building your own startup.

We analyze a cool, industry-shaping AI startup every week, with a full breakdown of what they do, how they make money, how much they’ve raised, and the opportunity ahead. 

Let’s get to the good stuff in this email: 

• This startup is automating phone agents with AI forever

• They’re already being used for customer support, sales and appointment setting

• They just came out of ‘Stealth’ and raised a $16M Series A

So what’s the startup and who are the founders behind it? Here’s the story of Bland AI 📈

📊 13.5 billion phone calls are made every single day. Hundreds of millions of those calls occur in call centers.

This is the market that Bland AI is capitalizing on.

Bland AI is a hyper-realistic AI phone agent founded by Isaiah Granet and Sobhan Nejad in 2023, that can make millions of phone calls, 24/7, in any voice, and for any use case.

This includes customer support, sales, appointment setting, operations, building product lines and many more.

Their customers use Bland to build AI phone agents that handle the bulk of their call volume, making these calls both cheap and efficient.

😖 The problem: Call centers are expensive and inefficient to run. Additionally call centers jobs have some of the highest turnover rates in the world. They’re grueling, don’t pay well and are highly repetitive.

💡 The Solution: Bland AI…

Using Bland, companies can build AI phone agents that are hyper-educated, have strict guidelines and integrate into every part of their tech stack.

Companies build the agent, integrate it into their CRMs and databases, and expand the use case whenever they need to. 🛃

Bland has even built their own programming language called ‘Conversational Pathways’ to negate AI hallucinations by splitting prompts into unique codes.

Backstory 👀

Throwback to 2012, when Isaiah was a 15 year old kid, he appeared on CNN as a CNN hero 🦸 for starting “San Diego Chill”, an ice hockey team for children with developmental disabilities.

As he grew older, Isaiah continued with San Diego Chill, turning it into a non-profit dedicated to helping children with special needs play sports.

Since, he’s helped raise over $2.5M!!! 💰

After graduating high school, Isaiah set out to have bigger plans, and joined the University of Washington in St Louis for CS and Economics.

Sobhan had also wanted to go to a top tier University, and had applied to UCLA, Stanford and UC Berkeley, but had no luck at all. 🍀 He was rejected by every single one of them.

Instead of joining a community college and wasting a whole year of his life, Sobhan wanted to start making an impact early, so started cold emailing and phone calling startup founders.

The founder of the startup Shogun reached back out to him with a full-time remote offer after Sobhan had interned there.

Meanwhile, Isaiah landed a full-time software engineering role at a different AI startup, Lantern and their careers started taking off. 🚀 

While working at these startups, the 2 met and quickly bonded over a shared love for software development and making an impact on the world.

They constantly saw other startups building with AI and realized they could start too. 

Isaiah and Sobhan started looking for problems that could be solved with AI, when suddenly Sobhan’s aunt passed away from pancreatic cancer.

During her hospitalization insurance repeatedly denied treatment, preventing her from accessing chemotherapy because it wasn’t “medically necessary”. 🏥 

This was an issue that Sobhan knew he had to solve.

This is when Sobhan and Isaiah thought of the idea for Intelliga Health - a startup using AI to streamline workflows for medical practices, and help write appeals back to insurance. 💊 

The 2 started building and quickly developed an MVP which worked quite well. They decided to apply to Y Combinator with the idea and got into the 2023 Summer batch.

That same summer, Isaiah became a Z Fellow (Started by Cory Levy), and the pair raised an undisclosed seed round led by Pioneer Fund. 💸 

🔒 They decided to keep it a “Stealth Startup”, only building in private.

While running Intelliga Health, the 2 founders realized there was a much bigger problem that wasn’t being addressed: Phone calls. ☎️

Call centers for these medical practices were inefficient and expensive to run, and jobs at these call centers had some of the highest turnover rates in the world.

This is when they decided to turn Intelliga Health into Bland AI - an AI phone agent startup that helps businesses replace call centers by automating the bulk of their call volumes.

With previous funding, a proven market, and a stronger network, the idea was poised to work.

And it did. The startup had product-market fit and is now being used by huge corporations and startups to automate their calls.

The Opportunity 🚀

💸 On August 28th 2024, Bland came out of “Stealth” and raised a $16M Series AI led by Scale Venture Partners with participation from Y Combinator, Max Levchin the founder of Paypal, Piotr Dąbkowski the CTO of Eleven Labs, and others. This brings their total raised to $22M.

🤑 The call center economy is a $30B+ industry that is currently growing at 10%+ per year.

💵 More than half the US population prefers talking on the phone with businesses instead of email and chat. Additionally, the average cost per call for US-based companies is somewhere between $3 and $5, making call centers impractical and expensive to run.

📈 This is a ripe market that Bland is planning to disrupt.

🦾 Bland is already being used by companies like Sears and Better.com to change the way enterprises interact with customers forever.

Before you go 👋

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