This AI Startup Is Taking Over Phone Sales

ℹ️ EPISODE INFO

Released

February 18, 2026

Duration

37m

Channel

YC Root Access

Watch on YouTube

▶ Open ↗

📝 EPISODE DESCRIPTION

In this episode of Founder Firesides, YC Managing Partner Jared Friedman talks to the founders of Simple AI (S24), Catheryn Li & Zach Kamran, who just raised a seed round of $14M. Simple AI gives businesses an AI sales agent that handles inbound calls end-to-end and outperforms their human reps. Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs

🎤 SPEAKERS

• Jared Friedman

  host

  Host on YC Root Access who interviews startup founders and discusses YC/startup building.

• Zach Kamran

  guest

  Co-founder of Simple AI focused on engineering production-grade AI voice agents (latency, orchestration, model tuning).

• Catheryn Li

  guest

  Co-founder of Simple AI with prior experience leading product/engineering at YC internal software teams and previously at Meta.

🧾 EPISODE SUMMARY

In this episode of YC Root Access, featuring Jared Friedman and Zach Kamran, This AI Startup Is Taking Over Phone Sales explores Simple AI builds voice agents that sell and outperform call centers. Simple AI started as a consumer “better Siri,” then pivoted to an outbound calling assistant, and ultimately became an inbound AI sales agent after businesses asked to use the voice technology.

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