Flai's AI dealership software books 50,000 appointments a month

A year ago, Flai was a three-person team pitching car dealerships on software to manage phone calls, emails and texts. Today, the startup works with more than 10 of the top 50 dealer groups in the country, and its AI now answers and engages customers, runs outbound campaigns, and books appointments — 50,000 a month — across both sales and service, CEO Ari Polakof told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview. That growth has driven a 20x increase in revenue, he said.

The momentum is attracting investors. On Tuesday, Flai said it raised a $27 million Series A led by automation-focused firm Base10 Partners. The round included dealers Friedkin Group and Findlay Automotive, Toyota’s venture arm, Y Combinator and First Round Capital.

Polakof said the growth is coming from customers who buy into a bigger vision: an AI-powered customer relationship management platform built from the ground up and tailored to each dealer’s needs. “Sure, we do answer the phone calls, but we’re following up with customers, we’re alerting the leadership whenever they need to take a look at something,” he said, describing a shift from “just a phone solution to more of a platform.”

Flai says its software is also flexible across languages and use cases. Earlier this year, co-founder Juan Alzugaray wrote on LinkedIn that the company launched with a luxury dealer in Puerto Rico where customers “switch between Spanish and English mid-conversation.” The dealer started with inbound service calls, then added sales, and the group is now rolling Flai out across all eight of its stores, he wrote.

Much of Flai’s growth has come from word of mouth among dealers, and the company now generates half of its revenue from new customers, according to Polakof. He credited the referrals to both the quality of the software and the speed of onboarding: Flai’s software can go live at a dealership 10 days after a contract is signed, and he tells his roughly 40-person team to respond to customers within 20 minutes “at most.”

Polakof said that focus on speed and dealership-specific knowledge is what protects Flai from broader, less specialized products like Muse, which Meta has pitched as a one-shot AI solution for small businesses.

Despite the momentum, Polakof said there’s one customer he hasn’t landed yet: his own local dealership. “I’m actually trying much harder than I should to make them a customer,” he said.

Why it matters

Flai’s deep, dealer-specific integration — rather than a generic small-business AI tool — is becoming its pitch against larger platform players entering the same market.