Bland raises $50M to replace call center bots for hospitals, airlines, and eventually 911 — trains its own voice models

Speaker 1: Yeah. Sorry for the technical difficulties, but, yeah, great great to get the update.

Speaker 2: And we will talk to you soon. Have a good rest

Speaker 6: of Goodbye. Your

Speaker 1: See you, Ryan.

Speaker 2: Let me tell you about public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Our next guest Isaiah Granet, is the co founder and CEO. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Speaker 1: What's up, dude?

Speaker 8: I'm doing good. This is like the coolest thing I get to do for this fundraiser announcement. Fantastic.

Speaker 7: We'll kick it

Speaker 1: off. Know. I know. It's way too fundraising.

Speaker 8: How much

Speaker 2: did you raise?

Speaker 1: This is way overdue.

Speaker 2: How much did you raise?

Speaker 8: We we raised 50,000,000.

Speaker 1: Hit it again. Hit it again because it should have.

Speaker 2: We go. Congratulations. Now, tell us what do you do? Long overdue.

Speaker 8: Yeah. So you guys know when you you call basically any big company in The US and you have to deal with one of those really annoying bots, we replace that with AI. But our specialty, we like to say, is, like, we wanna do the calls where if something goes wrong, someone sues or dies. We do the really complex, hard to handle calls, then we do that without OpenAI. I don't know if I'm allowed to say that on here. Yeah. They're off to anyone else.

Speaker 1: So So you're training your own models?

Speaker 8: Yeah. Correct.

Speaker 1: And okay. So so more specifically, like, are you working, like, 911 calls? Is that is that I imagine that's not your focus, right? Because it or or maybe it is, but I know there's some companies that that just focus on that. Are you thinking like hospitals? Like, what what what kind of give us some more maybe concrete examples.

Speaker 8: Hospitals, airlines, and, yes, 911 calls eventually. So we're actually working on a product offering for that right now. I can't say too much about that, but I I do have this weird feeling that, like, poetically, I'm gonna die by a botched AI 911 call one day. And that's kinda my mission in

Speaker 1: the Don't man it. Don't yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You gotta you're a time traveler going back in time. I gotta warm myself in order to You not you gotta save yourself. What what how describe this mark like, describe voice a describe the Voice AI market. Right? Like, you guys have some competition from the Frontier Labs, but it seems like less competition than than maybe one would think or maybe it's like feel almost certainly has to be less competitive than, you know, coding agents, right, where you have, you know, thousands of companies and the labs and the hyperscalers all competing.

Speaker 8: Yeah. Yeah. And you'd be surprised. So, like, two years ago, we were we were one of the first companies to do this. This is, like, well before the labs. And I have a little binder of screenshots of different VCs that I'm sure talk about their voice AI pieces today who said no one will be talking to AI two years from today. And by the way, very unpopular if you go into a fundraiser reminding them that they said that. They don't like that. No. I I don't recommend that.

Speaker 2: Clean gloves for sure. We've been on that point of like like no one will be talking to AI, it seems like are you actually increasing the length of phone calls? Like I'm seeing like the typical call last thirty to forty five minutes. That feels like too long honestly. That feels like a long time. Are people asking your models to

Speaker 1: write only.

Speaker 2: Python for them or something, and they're transcribing it one one character at

Speaker 7: a time?

Speaker 6: Like, what's going on?

Speaker 7: Be a

Speaker 8: little roundabout. But, yeah, we we do calls with, like, 90 year old patients doing forty five minute long remote patient monitoring calls.

Speaker 2: Okay.

Speaker 8: And so if you want them to put on the blood pressure device, right, and you want to figure out if they're having a heart attack, you have to hear about their grandchild first.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 8: That is an immovable object you have to get through.

Speaker 2: Sure. Okay.

Speaker 8: These are lonely, lonely Oh, that's interesting.

Speaker 2: So you actually have to somewhat like put guardrails on obviously, but not the guardrails can't be too narrow to the point where you're a phone tree because you actually do have to open up the customer, open up the the the user on the other end of the line and and start actually having a conversation before you can do a more complex interaction. Interesting. Oh, So do companies yeah. Do companies have like specific ideas about that preconceived notions whether they should or shouldn't do that, whether that's table stakes? Like, what does that look like?

Speaker 8: So we we work with a couple of like really big banks. Yeah. And one of them had a minute and a half long disclosure we had to leave at the start of every call.

Speaker 2: Okay.

Speaker 8: I know. Thank you.

Speaker 6: Yes.

Speaker 8: I I I worked that in there. So if you're a big bank watching this, please disregard everything else I've said and just reach out. But we we had to have a minute and a half long disclosure.

Speaker 3: So if

Speaker 8: you wanted to have a human being talk to our AI, you had to sit through a minute and a half Wow. Of straight reading out different things to them. And then they would get on you know, we get on calls with them, they'd say, like, it it it's varying. Right? Like, not every bank's like this. We work with some really big ones that are less painful. Mhmm. But they're like, yeah. How do we know the AI is not gonna say something racist?

Speaker 7: Like Sure.

Speaker 8: Sure. Pretty sure that it won't. Yeah. And you have to go through this really intensive testing process. And so what a lot of people don't realize is that these call centers and these really big ones that we're dealing with, every business has tried to get rid of them every possible way they can. They only exist because there's a gap between what the business wants to offer and what it can offer. And so when you hear about, like, AI receptionists or you hear about ecommerce, where's my order calls, that's not what we're doing. We're doing the hard part of the $250,000,000,000 a year spend in The US, and that is really early. That is, like, astoundingly early. I don't think people realize how early it is.

Speaker 2: Mhmm. Makes sense. What is I mean, you're talking to big banks. Like, what is the actual go to market motion funnel? Is it all sales driven or are there inbound? Do you have an inbound team? Or is there any, like, sort of, like, self serve option at this point?

Speaker 8: We have 350,000 self serve users, but most of it is actually inbound leads. So we do viral marketing every once in a while. You guys might have seen this, but we had a billboard. This is back before it was like cool to do billboards Okay. That said still hiring humans? Uh-huh.

Speaker 4: And it had

Speaker 8: a phone number on it.

Speaker 2: Okay.

Speaker 8: Not stop hiring humans. That is a different company that Yeah.

Speaker 3: Ripped that off. Okay.

Speaker 8: We're not happy with You

Speaker 1: guys were the you guys were the first.

Speaker 8: We were the we were the first, and I actually got a chance while the founder of that other company was getting a haircut to go up to him and tell him what I thought because I found out

Speaker 1: what was happening.

Speaker 2: The haircuts haircut crazy right now.

Speaker 6: Out of

Speaker 1: the audience.

Speaker 8: Oh, it's sort of a captive audience. Right? Yeah. The the poor the poor people did not know what was going on and why we were so upset at each other.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Because you invented billboards. Yeah. So, him to come in and not only run a billboard but to use similar language is just, you know

Speaker 8: Same same everything. I was like He's like, oh, I'm a big fan of your billboards. I'm like, yeah, I know.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Ted Turner.

Speaker 8: But, yeah. So we we bought the rights to Soulja Boy's Voice, for example. Soulja Boy, like Crank That. Right? Yeah. Kiss Me Through the Phone. Yep.

Speaker 7: So we've done a lot

Speaker 8: of viral marketing and we managed to get CIOs, great people to come in and actually come to us. Yep. We do a lot of outbound too, but primarily

Speaker 1: CIOs, famous Soulja Boy. Yeah. Soulja Boy help you win in the enterprise?

Speaker 8: Like you would not believe because he was really popular around the time that most of the CIOs were like High

Speaker 2: school. Teenagers. High school. Yeah.

Speaker 8: Or, Yeah. You know, young

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. He probably crushes it like AWS reinvent in Vegas.

Speaker 1: Are there any any any of your customers actively using Soulja Boy's voice for their customer service or is that just like

Speaker 2: to I'm gonna read a disclosure to you for a minute and a half, but I'm bringing in Soldier Boy Advance. I think that's a win win.

Speaker 1: Be retention there would probably be Yeah. Really quite good. Yeah. Why not?

Speaker 8: Yes. Actually, there's a lot of mostly, there's there's a lot of restaurants because apparently people really love it. But we have his name published under a different name on the platform. So we have Soulja Boy's official voice, and then we have a a name that's hidden for the other one. The other voice is very popular. So there are a few enterprises that if you stumble upon it and you call, you might not realize it, but you're actually

Speaker 1: talking to

Speaker 8: Soldier Boy.

Speaker 1: The one and only. Wow. Yeah. Talked about working with Paul Lieberstein. Never Behind get to Toby on The Office.

Speaker 2: Oh, yeah.

Speaker 8: I never get to meet the celebrities. It's always the marketing team. He was incredibly nice to work with, very pleasant. Ramp had Kevin or Brian, and I I have to be very careful about the names, and not mixing them up. But we were like, who's the most boring person that we could possibly think of? Because the company's name is bland, so it kinda comes with the territory. Sure. And everyone was like, well, Toby from the office. Paul, I think, was humored by that. Took it very graciously, and we ended up having a lot of really great interaction with that. And and sort of goes along with our our marketing, which is fun and engaging, but not maybe disruptive to the where you're like, these guys, I wouldn't trust them to handle my 911 calls.

Speaker 2: Sure. Sure. Sure.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Imagine The entire imagine calling 911 and Soulja Boy picks it.

Speaker 10: Soulja Boy.

Speaker 1: That that would be worrisome. I gotta I gotta say. Oh, wow. But good lead gen.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, thank you so much

Speaker 1: for coming on the show. Who who did who did the round?