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Phonely is one of the first 20 Australian start-ups to be selected for the three-month intensive Y Combinator program, and its co-founders will soon travel to California where they will receive a $US500,000 ($750,000) investment, as well as mentoring and connections.
Getting there wasn’t easy: the pair had to navigate a 3am Zoom interview with Y Combinator just hours after pitching their start-up onstage at a Startup Victoria AI event, where they won the people’s choice award.
“It was absolutely insane,” Bodewes said. “We had been working on Phonely for seven months, and we had just been trying and trying, and nothing was taking. In that week leading up, we had four different investors turn us down, and we were trying to figure out how we were going to be able to get this thing to work.
“You always hear stories of things like this happening, and those opportunities always seem to happen to other people. So, to be on the other end of that, after all the stress and anxiety that has gone into it, we have a chance of building exactly what we want to build, which is a really big company that has a big impact.”
Phonely’s launch comes at a time of heightened anxiety around the potential job losses that might follow in AI’s wake, particularly given its use can often be cheaper than employing humans to do the same job.
For Bodewes, he wants Phonely to be a net positive for humanity, rather than a net negative.
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“It’s something I spend a lot of time thinking about,” he said. “We want to hopefully create situations where people can be in more fulfilling positions and doing better work.
“Right now, the state of artificial intelligence is it makes people a lot more efficient at what they’re doing. So for small businesses that want to provide great service to their customers, the people working in a receptionist job can now move into better positions that are more fulfilling for them. Our job is not to replace or eliminate a lot of these jobs, it’s just to allow people to be in better positions to work on more fun and challenging problems,” Bodewes said.
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