Synthflow raises $7.4 million to provide no-code voice assistance for SMEs

What is AI good for? Automating repetitive tasks for busy people running small businesses, says Berlin-based startup Synthflow, which is announcing $7.4 million in seed funding for its SMB-focused no-code AI voice assistant platform.

Since its founding in spring last year, the startup has now raised a total of $9.1 million, underscoring continued investor enthusiasm for accelerating generative AI applications.

The startup also claims to be approaching the 1,000 customer mark – and touts “double-digit” monthly growth rates since emerging from stealth development and launching its browser-based “no-code” tool in December 2023. That suggests there’s a healthy interest among SMBs in adopting – or at least experimenting with – generative AI tools that promise easily achievable productivity gains.

The new funds will be used for research and development, said Hakob Astabatsyan, CEO and co-founder of Synthflow. The team wants to further fuel its initial momentum by increasing the usefulness of its products and expanding the circle of SMEs for which it is attractive.

“We have a lot of ideas. We know exactly what customers need,” he tells TechCrunch.

Astabatsyan, a serial entrepreneur with a business background, was formerly at Rocket Internet. He is joined on his latest project by his brother Albert, who also worked with him on a previous no-code startup, and Sassun Mirzakhan-Saky, who brings a background in software development and CTO expertise to the team.

Synthflow’s product initially launched with an English-language call management solution, as the largest markets are English-speaking. German and French language versions have now been added (note: these are still in beta). Therefore, a stronger focus on the latter markets in Europe is also planned.

End-to-end experience

Call centers were among the early adopters of AI voice agents, using APIs from large language models (LLMs) to run systems that could answer phone calls in a human-like manner—but with tireless energy and enthusiasm, 24/7, even if communication was not always flawless.

Synthflow takes the concept in a slightly different direction, targeting SMBs in the service sector directly, including those at the lower end of the category with a DIY, “no code” offering. The goal is to provide SMBs with an “end-to-end” experience, says Astabatsyan, who argues that the return on investment from automating core tasks like scheduling will be immediately apparent to the resource-poor target companies.

“AI can do it more cost-effectively and reliably, and humans can do other things,” is his succinct pitch for voice assistance.

As an example, he cites a tradesman or mechanic who normally answers the phone himself outside of working hours and inevitably misses many calls and therefore loses out on orders. Or a dentist whose receptionist only works to a limited extent and is therefore not always available.

Having a tool to handle basic customer inquiries could be crucial for small businesses, Astabatsyan argues.

Synthflow’s focus on SMEs inevitably means that a key focus of the startup is making AI technology accessible to non-technical users. That’s why the company has developed a no-code interface for its customers to build voice agents that meet the needs of their businesses.

“We wanted to try to build something simple,” he explains. “A no-code layer on top of (the AI ​​agent) so that … business owners and business-oriented people can play around with it and get comfortable with it and explore what LLMs can do for their companies.”

Synthflow’s interface lets customers drag and drop elements to configure voice AIs that can perform specific tasks for them – like scheduling appointments, going through FAQs, or performing “information extraction,” such as gathering personal information from a prospect so a human can call them back.

“Let’s say someone needs to call and certain questions need to be asked and certain information needs to be collected – especially static information like address, location, etc. – then AI is very good,” he argues.

The customer can configure the AI ​​assistant to reveal that it is a robot. “I think it is a very good practice to reveal that it is a virtual assistant,” says Astabatsyan. “My personal favorite way to start is: ‘Hello. My name is (so and so), right now all our lines are busy. I’m sorry about that. I am the virtual assistant here at (company name). How can I help you?'”

Another big benefit of voice AI, according to Astabatsyan, is detecting when a call needs to be transferred to a human agent. Essentially, AI is being used to filter incoming calls by complexity—with automation taking care of the simple requests, which further amplifies the benefit by freeing up human agents to deal with more complex customer queries.

He stresses that the goal is not to replace human jobs. Rather, AI will help small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to be more productive and efficient than would be possible with their limited resources.

For this reason, Synthflow’s system not only allows customers to use voice agents, but also handles post-call data entry, such as adding appointments to a calendar tool. Building integrations with third-party software is therefore another focus for the team.

“That’s what AI does so well,” he argues. “Because it can take that information (extracted from a call) and update certain fields in a particular CRM, for example – and when you do these things at scale, across hundreds or thousands of calls, suddenly we see this technological advantage that we saw (when companies first adopted computers).”

For the voice agents, the startup builds on OpenAI’s GPT LLM, but also integrates its own AI models – which, according to Astabatsyan, were trained using its own data and tailored to specific customer use cases.

He says the company has also developed its own “speech orchestration layer” that converts the customer’s speech into text, which can then be fed to the AI ​​model as a prompt, returning an automated response that the system converts from text to speech, which the customer hears as a synthetic voice on the other end of the phone line.

Currently, Synthflow is focused on using AI for inbound calls – which Astabatsyan says is the most achievable automation opportunity for resource-strapped companies. However, he hints that more sophisticated features are in development, with research and development fueled by the generous seed funding.

He mentions that, among other things, they’re working on a feature that will allow Synthflow’s voice AIs to perform what he calls “live actions” or “connections.” This means that during a call, the AI ​​could perform a check on live inventory in a warehouse. Or it could pull up another piece of requested information and “pass it on to somewhere else,” as he puts it.

He also outlines a scenario where task-oriented AI voice systems could extend their utility together. They could route a call to other dedicated voice AIs trained to perform other tasks requested by the customer.

“The key is to focus on who your customers are. Because depending on who you’re building it for, your product is going to be very, very, very different,” he adds.

If voice AI and voice assistant systems live up to the productivity hype and deliver on the promise of efficiently handling a wide range of customer requests, including by expertly routing more complex matters to the right system or person for processing, one of the things that could happen is that the average SMB finds that it has significantly more work than it can handle.

“I think that’s an interesting question that many managers and leaders should think about, don’t you think?” he replies, discussing this scenario. “For example, if there is so much capacity – and productivity is unleashed – how can we channel these human resources into other sectors of the economy? Because I think that question has not yet been answered, but it is indeed a very interesting question.”

Synthflow’s seed funding is led by Singular, with participation from existing investor Atlantic Labs and a number of investors in the AI ​​space, including the founders of Krisp AI.