customer-service-automation
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Stanley Wei
Stanley Wei is the CEO and co-founder of Pine AI (19pine.ai), a San Francisco startup building an autonomous AI agent that fights consumers' customer-service battles for them: negotiating bills, cancelling subscriptions, disputing overcharges, and chasing refunds through real phone calls and emails. A former Chief Strategy and Operating Officer at Nasdaq-listed Agora and a former investor at Hillhouse Capital, Wei founded Pine in late 2024 after a $200 dispute with his bank ate up 90 minutes of his life. Pine raised a $25 million Series A in December 2025 and reports more than $37 million in consumer savings.
Brian Schiff
Brian Schiff is the co-founder and CEO of Flip CX, a New York voice AI company that automates customer service phone calls for retail, ecommerce, healthcare and transportation brands. He and Sam Krut started the company at Cornell in 2015 as a campus ride-hailing app called RedRoute, then pivoted to voice automation after seeing how broken phone support was. Today Flip has processed more than 300 million automated calls for around 250 global brands, automating up to 90% of inbound volume. In January 2026 the company raised a $20M Series A co-led by Next Coast Ventures and Ridge Ventures, bringing total funding to roughly $31M.
Malte Kosub
Malte Kosub is the co-founder and CEO of Parloa, a Berlin-born enterprise AI company building agentic AI for customer service. He started his first company in 11th grade, founded the conversational AI agency Future of Voice in 2017, and spun out Parloa in 2018. In January 2026 Parloa raised a $350M Series D at a $3 billion valuation - tripling its worth in eight months. Kosub has stated his ambition to build a $100 billion company out of Germany.
Nikola Mrkšić
Nikola Mrkšić is the co-founder and CEO of PolyAI, a voice AI company building enterprise-grade conversational agents that handle customer service calls so naturally that callers sometimes apologize mid-sentence for being rude to what they assume is a person. Born in Belgrade in 1991, Mrkšić earned a full scholarship to Cambridge, completed a PhD on spoken dialogue systems, co-built VocalIQ before Apple acquired it, and then founded PolyAI in 2017 with two Cambridge lab colleagues. The company has raised $206M across four rounds - most recently an $86M Series D in December 2025 at a $750M valuation - and its voice agents now handle calls for Marriott, FedEx, Caesars Entertainment, and over 200 enterprise customers across 45+ languages in 25+ countries.
Raghu Ravinutala
Raghu Ravinutala is the co-founder and CEO of Yellow.ai, an enterprise-grade conversational AI platform that automates customer and employee experiences at scale. A former IC design engineer turned AI entrepreneur, he built Yellow.ai into a $500M-valued company serving 1,300+ enterprises across 85+ countries, with $79.5M in annual revenue and over $102M raised. Under his leadership, Yellow.ai developed proprietary LLM technology and a multi-LLM architecture trained on 16 billion conversations annually, processing support in 135+ languages across 35+ channels.