What’s AI good for? Automating repetitive tasks for the very busy people running small businesses, reckons Berlin-based startup Synthflow, which is announcing a $7.4 million seed round for its SME-focused no code platform for AI voice assistance.
Since being founded around spring last 12 months, the startup has now banked a complete of $9.1 million, underscoring ongoing investor enthusiasm for accelerating applications of generative AI.
The startup also claims to be approaching 1,000 customers — touting “double-digit” monthly growth rates because it stepped out of stealthy development to launch its browser-based “no code” tool in December 2023. That means there’s a healthy appetite amongst SMEs to adopt — or no less than experiment with — generative AI tools that promise easy-to-reach productivity gains.
The brand new funding shall be ploughed into R&D, in response to Synthflow CEO and co-founder Hakob Astabatsyan, who says the team is keen to maintain stoking its early momentum by increasing product utility and broadening the scope of SMEs to which it’s appealing.
“We now have very many ideas. We all know exactly what the purchasers need,” he tells TechCrunch.
Astabatsyan, a serial entrepreneur with a business background, is ex-Rocket Web. Joining him in his latest enterprise are his brother, Albert, who also worked with him on a previous no code startup; and Sassun Mirzakhan-Saky, who brings a software engineering background and CTO expertise to the team.
While Synthflow’s product kicked off with English-language call handling because its largest markets are English-speaking, it has since added German and French language versions (note: these are still in beta). So dialing up its deal with the latter markets in Europe can also be on the cards.
End-to-end experience
Call centers were early adopters of AI voice agents, pulling on large language models’ (LLMs) APIs to power systems that would answer phone calls in a human-like way — just with indefatigable energy and enthusiasm 24/7, if not at all times flawless comprehension.
Synthflow is taking the concept in a rather different direction, targeting service industry-focused SMEs directly, including those towards the smaller end of the category with a DIY “no code” offering. The goal is to supply SMEs an “end-to-end” experience, per Astabatsyan, who argues that the return on investment from with the ability to automate core tasks like appointment scheduling shall be immediately obvious to its goal resource-strapped businesses.
“The AI can do it in a more cost-effective manner, more reliably, and humans can do other stuff,” is his concise pitch for voice assistance.
He gives the instance of a handyman or mechanic who would typically answer the phone themselves when not working on a job — meaning they inevitably find yourself missing plenty of calls and losing out on some business because of this; or a dentist who employs a receptionist who works limited hours so, again, isn’t at all times around to select up the phone.
Having a tool that may handle basic customer enquiries may very well be a gamechanger for small businesses, Astabatsyan argues.
Synthflow’s goal being SMEs necessarily means a core focus for the startup is making AI technology accessible to non-technical users — which is why it’s built a no code interface for its customers to design voice agents that fit the needs of their businesses.
“We desired to try to construct something easy,” he explains. “A no code layer on top [of AI agents] in order that… business owners, business oriented people, can go and mess around with this and get familiar and explore the what LLMs can do for his or her businesses.”
Synthflow’s interface lets customers drag and drop elements to configure voice AIs that may perform specific tasks for them — akin to scheduling appointments; running through FAQs; or performing “information extraction,” akin to obtaining personal information from a possible customer so a human can call them back.
“Let’s say if someone has to call, and there may be a selected set of inquiries to be asked and particular pieces of data to be collected — especially static ones, akin to, address, home, etc — AI is excellent,” he argues.
The shopper can decide to configure the AI assistant so it discloses it’s a robot. “I believe it is rather good practice to reveal that it’s a virtual assistant,” says Astabatsyan. “My personal favourite opening is: ‘Hello. My name is [so-and-so], at once, all our lines are busy. I apologise for that. I’m the virtual assistant here at [the name of the business]. How can I provide help to?’.”
One other big utility for voice AIs is recognizing when a call must be transferred to a human agent, in response to Astabatsyan. So, essentially, using AI to filter inbound calls based on complexity — with automation taking good care of the easy requests which then compounds the profit by freeing up human agents to have more time to spend on more complex customer enquiries.
He stresses the goal isn’t to interchange human jobs but somewhat suggests AI might help SMEs be more productive and efficient than they might otherwise be with their limited resources.
For this reason, in addition to letting customers deploy voice agents, Synthflow’s system is designed to deal with post-call data entry tasks too — adding appointments to a calendar tool as an illustration. Constructing out integrations with third-party software is thus one other big focus for the team.
“That is what the AI is so good at,” he argues. “Because it could possibly take this information [extracted from a call] and, let’s say, update particular fields specifically CRM — and when you do this stuff at scale, on a whole bunch or 1,000s of calls, suddenly we’re seeing this technology advantage that we saw [when businesses first adopted] computers.”
For the voice agents, the startup is constructing on OpenAI’s GPT LLM but additionally incorporating its own AI models on top — which Astabatsyan says have been trained by itself data and fine-tuned to specific customer use-cases.
He says it has also built its own “voice orchestration layer” which converts the client’s speech into text that may then be fed to the AI model as a prompt, returning an automatic answer that the system converts from text into speech the client hears as a synthesized voice on the opposite end of the phone line.
For now, Synthflow is targeted on using AI with inbound calls — which Astabatsyan suggests are the low hanging fruit for automation for resource-strapped businesses. But he hints at more sophisticated capabilities in development, with R&D fuelled by the chunky seed round.
One thing he mentions they’re working on is a feature that may enable Synthflow’s voice AIs to perform what he refers to as “live actions” or “connections” — meaning that in a call the AI would give you the chance to run a check on live inventory in a warehouse. Or pull in one other other piece of requested info and “push it elsewhere,” as he puts it.
He also sketches a scenario where task-focused AI voice systems would give you the chance to expand their utility collectively. They might hand off a call to other dedicated voice AIs trained for various tasks being requested by the client.
“The important thing here is to have deal with who your customers are. Because, depending for whom you’re constructing this, your product goes to be very, very, very different,” he adds.
One impact to contemplate is, if voice AIs and voice assistance systems live as much as the productivity hype — slickly delivering on the promise of efficiently handling a complete layer of customer enquiries, including by expertly redirecting more complex stuff to the fitting system or human to take care of — it could find yourself meaning the typical SME discovers they’ve an awful lot more work than they’re in a position to tackle.
“I believe that’s an interesting query for plenty of managers and leaders to take into consideration, right?” he responds, discussing this scenario. “Like, if there’s a lot capability — and productivity gets unleashed — how will we channel this human resources in other sectors of the economy? Because I believe this query is just not answered yet, but it surely’s a really interesting query indeed.”
Synthflow’s seed funding is led by Singular, with participation from existing investor Atlantic Labs and plenty of investors within the AI space, including the founders of Krisp AI.
