call-center-automation
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Vlad Chernyshov
Vlad Chernyshov is the co-founder and CEO of Dasha.AI, a New York conversational-voice-AI company he started in late 2016 to build machines that talk like people - with the ums, the breaths, the interruptions and all. A competitive programmer out of Novosibirsk, Russia, he landed his first paying customer (a San Francisco dental practice) the day after Y Combinator rejected him, raised a $2M seed from RTP Global in 2019, and has framed Dasha's real target not as call centers but as artificial general intelligence reached through speech.
Catheryn Li
Catheryn Li is the co-founder and CEO of Simple AI, a San Francisco voice-AI startup building phone agents that sell. After four years at Y Combinator - where she led the software team behind Startup School, the YC Library, and Co-Founder Matching - she and Zach Kamran started Simple AI in the 2024 YC batch. Their agents are trained on top human reps, know every product SKU, and the company says they outperform trained live reps by 30% on conversion and upsell. Simple AI raised a $14M seed round led by First Harmonic with Y Combinator, True Ventures, and Massive Tech Ventures. Li holds degrees in computer science and mathematics from MIT.