Flai, the AI agent startup for car dealerships founded in San Francisco in 2025 by Uruguayans Ari Polakof, Alen Polakof and Juan Alzugaray, closed a US$27 million Series A led by Base10 Partners.
The round also featured First Round Capital, Toyota Ventures, Y Combinator and two strategic dealer groups: Friedkin Group and Findlay Automotive. With this operation, Flai has accumulated more than US$33 million raised since its founding.
The three co-founders emigrated from Uruguay almost a decade ago to study engineering in the US. Ari Polakof and Alen Polakof were founding engineers of HappyRobot, the voice agent startup for logistics; Alen Polakof also spent four years on Uber’s infrastructure team.
Juan Alzugaray was a data scientist at Netflix. They went through Y Combinator’s summer crop, closing a $4.5 million seed in October 2025 and expanding it to $6 million in January with the entry of Toyota Ventures, after the team will visit nearly 400 dealer locations to train their models.
Agents who attend, schedule and resume contact
Flai agents answer calls, messages and emails from dealerships 24 hours a day, schedule service and sales appointments, launch outbound campaigns such as maintenance notices and recalls, resume contact with buyers who stopped responding, and alert the team when a customer is upset or unresponsive.
Everything is integrated with the CRM and management systems of each dealership. Along with the round, Flai also presented its own CRM for sales and service that connects each conversation with the team’s pending tasks.
At two of its largest clients, the platform already automates half of the service operation, a task that previously occupied teams of 20 to 30 people.
Billing has been growing between 25% and 30% monthly for more than a year and multiplied by 20 in the last year, in a market where in the first half of 2026 alone, US dealers registered more than 136 million repair orders and service sales close to US$83 billion.
Uruguay as a technological base
With the new resources, Flai will accelerate its growth, incorporate new dealers and deepen the sale of modules to its current customers. The team grew from three people to about 40 in less than a year, with part of the team already in Uruguay, where the company will formally open an office in November.
The commitment to Uruguay as a base for technological development consolidates a pattern that is repeated in the ecosystem: Latin American founders who build in Silicon Valley but anchor their technical talent in the region.
