Flip, a startup that claims to offer an Amazon Alexa-like voice AI experience for businesses, has raised $20 million in a Series A funding round, it tells Crunchbase News exclusively.
CEO Brian Schiff and CRO Sam Krut met a decade ago in college and began building different ventures together. After a few pivots, they raised funding for New York-based Flip in 2018 with the goal of building AI that “answers and automatically resolves routine requests” for customers calling into a variety of businesses. They started with a focus on transportation companies and moved into retail in 2021 and healthcare in 2024.
AI-based customer service is a saturated space, but Schiff claims Flip’s approach is differentiated because it’s a vertical one that is very focused on just three industries.
“While horizontal industry-agnostic ‘platforms’ require custom-building the experience and integration, vertical players like Flip come ready ‘out-of-the-box’ with everything brands in that industry need built in,” Schiff told Crunchbase News.
Among vertical players, Schiff claims that Flip has an advantage because its AI “is battle-tested on more than 300 million phone calls.”
Next Coast Ventures and Ridge Ventures co-led the round for Flip, which says it has raised a total of $31 million in funding. Data Point Capital also participated in the round, alongside ScOp Venture Capital, Bullpen Capital, Forum Ventures and a group of angel investors. Flip declined to reveal valuation, saying only that it was up 3x compared to its seed raise.
Year-over-year growth
Today, Flip has hundreds of enterprise customers, including Under Armour, Tory Burch, Newell Brands and global transportation companies. The company has reached an eight-figure ARR, growing 3x year over year, according to Schiff.
Interestingly, the idea for Flip came when Schiff and Krut were students at Cornell University. They had built a ride-hailing app called Red Route for calling taxis at Cornell, at a time when Uber was still banned in upstate New York. It was during that experience they came up with the idea for what is today Flip.
“Customer service is one of the obvious AI categories for business, and we’re talking on a daily and weekly basis with the largest brands on the planet,” Schiff said. “Even for them, it’s not a question of ‘if.’ It’s a question of ‘when’ and ‘with whom.’”
That, he said, has created “a huge amount of noise” in the market.
Over the past year or so, a number of what Schiff described as “generic AI providers” popped up.
“The great irony of this space right now is that while all of the headlines and much of the funding has gone into these generic platforms that are trying to be the AI everything for everyone, across every industry, every channel, every use case. In reality, most of the actual traction, most of the successful customer stories, are working with vendors like Flip that are going very deep into one or a couple of specific industries,” Schiff told Crunchbase News in an interview.
Another differentiator, in his view, is that few companies have developed deep expertise with AI telephone customer service.
“Most people are doing it inside of chatbots or auto email responders,” he said. “We really look at the quality of the experience. It doesn’t matter how nice it is to talk to — it’s still just another bot that’s in the way of a customer trying to solve their problem.”
When it comes to the revenue model, Flip doesn’t charge an upfront cost or require a long-term commitment. Rather, it charges per automated call — a usage model it has implemented since its early days.
‘A vertical approach yields the best results’
Alex Rosen, managing partner at Ridge Ventures, believes that customer service is one of the few huge markets where generative AI has produced tangible results for enterprise customers and a better experience for users.
“Based on our 30+ years of investing in software, we believe a vertical approach yields the best results,” he wrote via email. “Flip has taken a different approach than many others by focusing on a couple of verticals and going really deep … While there are plenty of competitors making noise, some are going after different parts of the market, and Flip has quietly, up to now, launched more live customer deployments, at scale, than anyone.”
Mike Smerklo, co-founder and managing director at Next Coast Ventures, said he has spent nearly two decades in and around call centers and voice technologies and has “never seen a more compelling ROI for customers” than what Flip offers.
He added: “The founding team is exceptional, customer feedback has been tremendous, and the potential for Flip to become a $1 billion business is clear.”
Smerklo said he is also impressed with the company’s capital-efficient approach to growth.
“Several other companies that have raised tremendously more money have to rely on ‘forward engineering’ to get their product to work for customers,” he said. “Flip’s solution works, doesn’t require a massive investment from customers, and solves real, salient business issues.”
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
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