Regal's AI Answers the Phone So Your Call Center Doesn't Have To

Call a company today and you can feel the design decisions. The phone number buried three menus deep on the website. The chatbot that answers "talk to a human" with a link to a help article. The hold music that loops until you give up. For twenty years, the contact center was optimized to do one thing: keep you away from a person. Regal thinks that was a mistake worth a business.

Regal is a New York company that builds AI voice agents for contact centers. The agents pick up inbound calls, place outbound ones, qualify leads, book appointments, hand off to humans when a call gets complicated, and update the customer record while the conversation is still happening. Founded in 2020 by Alex Levin and Rebecca Greene, it has quietly become one of the more interesting bets in a crowded market - a market that includes 8x8, UJET, Content Guru, Voiso and Salesforce, most of which Regal now partners with rather than fights.

The number that gets attention is 500 million. That's how many calls Regal's agents have handled. The number that explains the company is smaller and older: two founders who spent years watching good service software do the opposite of good service.

01 / The originThey came from inside the problem

Levin and Greene met at Angi, the home-services marketplace (you may remember it as Angie's List), where Greene had been Chief Product Officer at Handy before its acquisition. Before that, Greene did product at Amazon and strategy work at Booz & Company and Bear Stearns. Levin studied at Harvard and ran growth and product at Handy and Thomson Reuters. Neither came from an AI lab. They came from the operational side of a business that lived and died on the quality of its phone calls.

What they saw there is the whole thesis. The legacy contact center software they used treated every customer call as a cost to be minimized. Hide the number. Deflect to a bot. Route to whoever is cheapest. It worked as a spreadsheet exercise and failed as a customer experience. So in 2020 they left to build the opposite. The name is the tell: Regal, as in treat the customer like royalty.

Our high-touch CCaaS puts the customer at the center of every interaction.Alex Levin, Co-founder & CEO

Here's the part worth stealing if you're building anything: Regal did not start as an AI company. It started as an outbound dialer and engagement tool - software to help brands run better sales and support conversations at scale. The AI voice agent, the thing that now leads every headline, only became the product once large language models got good enough to actually hold a conversation. The founders had the vision early and waited for the technology to catch up to it. That's a different discipline than chasing whatever is hot.

02 / The productWhat an AI agent actually does on a call

The demo version of "AI agent" is a voice that talks. The product version is a voice that does things. Regal's agents are built for specific jobs - inbound routing, scheduling, appointment reminders, lead qualification, answering FAQs - and they are wired into the systems where the work lives. The company advertises 40-plus native integrations, which sounds like plumbing and is in fact the moat. An agent that can talk is a toy. An agent that can talk, then check your calendar, book the slot, transfer you to the right human, and log the outcome in the CRM before you hang up is a coworker.

The agents speak more than 30 languages with native fluency, run across voice, SMS and chat from a single build, and scale to effectively unlimited concurrency - the thing humans can't do. No hold time. No busy signal. No "we're experiencing higher than normal call volume." When a call gets past what the AI should handle, it hands off to a person, and Regal scores the whole interaction for quality and compliance afterward.

The customer list is the proof it's more than a pitch deck. Regal counts AAA, Angi, Toyota, Ro, K Health, Kin Insurance and Varsity Tutors among the brands using it to reach their customers. These are companies in insurance, healthcare, education and home services - industries where a phone call is often the moment a customer decides whether to trust you. That's a deliberate choice of battlefield.

03 / The betHigh-touch beats low-cost

Most AI-in-the-call-center stories are about replacing people to save money. Regal's framing is different, and it's the more defensible one: this is about scale, not subtraction. A small team using AI agents can sound like a huge one - reachable at 2 a.m., fluent in a customer's language, patient on the hundredth identical question. The value isn't a cheaper call. It's a call that happens at all, personalized, when the old model would have deflected it.

Whether that bet pays depends on a claim the founders make openly: they think more than 90% of contact center interactions will be AI-led within a decade, by around 2035. You can argue with the exact figure. The useful thing is that Regal is building for a world that doesn't fully exist yet, and pricing its roadmap against it, rather than optimizing the world as it is.

04 / The marketDon't fight the giants - partner with them

The contact-center-as-a-service market is not empty. 8x8, UJET, Content Guru and Voiso all sell platforms in this space, and the broader field includes Five9, NiCE, Genesys and Talkdesk. Salesforce sits over all of it as the CRM system of record. A startup could pick this fight and lose it on distribution alone.

Regal did something smarter. It picked a wedge - the high-value, personalized voice conversation, especially outbound - and then made itself a partner to the platforms instead of a rival. Regal for Salesforce shipped on the AppExchange, so its agents plug straight into the CRM enterprises already run. Regal joined the 8x8 Technology Partner Ecosystem, pairing its dialing and agent smarts with 8x8's contact center backbone. That's the classic move for a focused company in a market of giants: be the thing that makes the giant's product better, and let their sales team carry you.

05 / The money and the road aheadFunded for a decade-long bet

Regal has raised tens of millions of dollars across several rounds, including a $40 million round announced in October 2024 to accelerate its AI phone agents. Backers include Emergence Capital, an enterprise-software specialist that has funded category leaders before, along with Homebrew and Founder Collective. The company says clients have driven a cumulative $5 billion in revenue through better acquisition, sales, support and retention on its platform - the kind of number that only means something if the customers keep renewing, which so far they appear to.

We founded Regal to help brands drive more, and better, conversations with their customers.The founding thesis, in Levin's words

There are real questions ahead. AI voice agents live or die on trust - one badly handled healthcare or insurance call is worse than a hold queue. The 90%-by-2035 forecast is a bet, not a fact. And the giants Regal partners with today could decide to build the wedge themselves tomorrow. But the company has done the hard, unglamorous work that separates a demo from a product: the integrations, the languages, the handoffs, the 500 million calls of feedback. That last one is the quiet advantage. Every call is data on how a great conversation actually sounds - and there's no shortcut to collecting it.

The old contact center was built to keep you from a person. Regal is betting the next one is built to answer - it just won't always be a person answering.

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