Phonely is one of the first 20 Australian start-ups selected for the intensive three-month Y Combinator program, and its co-founders will soon travel to California, where they will receive a $US500,000 ($750,000) investment. as mentorship 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 on stage at a Startup Victoria AI event , where they won the people's award.
“It was absolutely crazy,” Bodewes said. “We'd been working on Phonely for seven months and we'd just been trying and trying and nothing was taking off. In that previous week, we had four different investors turn us down and we were trying to figure out how we could make this work.
“You always hear stories of things like this happening, and these opportunities always seem to happen to other people. So to be on the other side of that, after all the stress and anxiety that's been there, we have an opportunity to build 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 over the potential job losses that could follow in the wake of AI, especially given that using it 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 create situations where people can be in more fulfilling places and do better work.
“Right now, the state of artificial intelligence is that it makes people much more efficient at what they're doing. So for small businesses that want to provide great service to their customers, the people who work in a receptionist job they can now move on to better jobs that are more fulfilling to them. Our job is not to replace or eliminate many of those jobs, it's just to enable people to be in better positions to work on more fun problems and challenging,” Bodewes said.
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