Business Development Representative

Flai, an AI-powered customer relationship management software for car dealerships, has raised $27 million in Series A funding led by Base10 Partners. The round included investments from Friedkin Group, Findlay Automotive, Toyota's venture arm, Y Combinator, and First Round Capital. The startup now works with more than 10 of the top 50 dealer groups in the US. Its AI handles customer interactions, outbound campaigns, and scheduling across sales and service, booking 50,000 appointments monthly. This growth has driven a 20-fold revenue increase over the past year. Flai's software can be implemented in dealerships within 10 days of contract signing. The company has expanded from three employees to around 40. Half of its revenue now comes from new customers, largely through peer referrals amongst dealers. CEO Ari Polakof said the startup differentiates itself through deep integration tailored to each dealer's specific needs, going beyond basic phone answering to comprehensive customer management.

Flai raises $27M led by Base10 Partners to automate car dealership operations. What started with automating dealership communications has become something much bigger. Today, Flai is increasingly doing the operational work behind them. Flai started Flai to fix a simple but expensive problem: dealerships were losing customers because they couldn't answer every call or follow up consistently. Over the last year, Flai has grown more than 20x and now works with hundreds of dealerships, including more than 20% of the top 50 dealer groups in the country. Across service and sales, Flai helps dealerships answer customers, schedule visits, run outbound campaigns, and re-engage customers. Today, Flai schedules more than 50,000 appointments every month. As Flai has gone deeper into dealership operations, Flai has also proven its initial thesis, that the opportunity is much larger than communication. Flai is excited to announce that Flai has raised a $27 million Series A led by Base10 Partners, with participation from Toyota Ventures, First Round Capital, Y Combinator, The Friedkin Group, and Findlay Automotive Group. This funding will help Flai pursue its long-term vision: automating as much of dealership operations as possible. The conversation is only the beginning. Almost every customer interaction creates work behind it. Customers need to be contacted and scheduled. Missed appointments need to be recovered. Recalls and declined services need to be worked. Systems need to be updated, and sometimes the right person at the dealership needs to get involved. Historically, software has helped dealership employees keep track of this work. Flai believe AI can increasingly do the work itself. Once an agent can understand what needs to happen, communicate with the customer, connect to dealership systems, and take action, it can own increasingly large parts of the workflow. That is already happening at dealerships using Flai today. The conversation is becoming the entry point into execution. Today, Flai is introducing Flai's AI-native Service and Sales CRM. Traditional CRMs create tasks, organize pipelines, and tell people what to do next. But they still depend on someone noticing the opportunity, deciding what to do, and manually moving it forward. Flai is built around AI agents that can understand what's happening across the dealership and actually take action. It can identify missed opportunities, flag operational issues, surface heat cases with suggested resolutions, and automatically report on what needs attention. When action can be automated, Flai takes it: reaching out to customers, handling conversations, scheduling appointments, and updating dealership systems. When human judgment is needed, it brings in the right person with the full context and a recommended next step. The CRM doesn't just tell your team what needs to happen next. It makes it happen. What's next. Flai is using this funding to invest aggressively in product and engineering, deepen its integrations, and expand the workflows Flai can take responsibility for. Flai has been fortunate to build alongside some of the best operators in automotive. Having Toyota Ventures, The Friedkin Group, and Findlay Automotive Group investing alongside Base10, First Round Capital, and Y Combinator makes that especially meaningful. Flai has seen what AI deployed correctly inside dealerships can do. Now Flai is doubling down on it. Its ambition is to automate as much of the administrative work of running a dealership as possible, so the people inside the store can focus on what they do best: taking care of customers. There's an enormous amount left to build. That's what Flai is building at Flai. Flai is hiring across the team. If you want to help build the future of dealership operations, join Flai. And if you're a dealership interested in seeing what Flai can do for your store, get in touch with Flai at [email protected].