Category Visionaries Alex Levin, CEO & Co-Founder of Regal AI: $82 Million Raised to Transform Customer Communication with Voice AI
Regal AI is revolutionizing the contact center landscape with its voice AI agent platform that's transforming how businesses communicate with customers. With $82 million in funding, Regal has positioned itself at the forefront of the AI revolution in customer service. In this episode of Category Visionaries, I spoke with Alex Levin, CEO and Co-Founder of Regal AI, about the company's journey from building tools to optimize human agent performance to pioneering voice AI agents that can handle customer interactions with unprecedented effectiveness.
Topics Discussed:
- Regal AI's pivot from optimizing human agent calls to developing AI agents
- The economics of AI agents compared to human agents (10-20¢ per minute vs. $1 per minute)
- How AI agents achieve 97% containment rates versus the 20-40% traditional benchmark
- The challenges of enterprise sales in the contact center space
- The evolution of Regal's go-to-market strategy as AI capabilities have rapidly advanced
- The future of voice as the primary channel for brand engagement
GTM Lessons For B2B Founders:
- Timing your product evolution is critical: Alex emphasizes the importance of not moving too early or too late when pivoting to new technology. "If you invested too early, it was a waste, but if you wait too late then all the first trials with every company would be with another AI provider, not with us," Alex explains. Their decision to wait until LLMs were capable enough before focusing on AI agents prevented them from wasting resources on soon-to-be-obsolete technology while still allowing them to be early in the market.
- Enterprise sales requires embracing the process: When moving upmarket, Alex learned that trying to rush enterprise sales leads to poor outcomes. "If you try to rush it in an enterprise environment, which is possible, you're not going to have a good outcome," he shares. B2B founders should understand the sales timeline for their specific industry and be prepared for longer, more complex sales cycles when targeting enterprise customers.
- Build foundational technology that transcends AI hype: Regal's advantage came from building deep platform infrastructure before AI agents were ready. "Most of the companies that exist today, all they've ever built is this thing that interacts with the customer, the agent itself, the voice and the LLM, which is relatively trivial actually," Alex explains. By building integrations with customer data systems, decision engines, and channel management tools first, they created a more comprehensive solution that could quickly incorporate AI advances when the technology matured.
- Reconsider conventional marketing channels: Alex notes that traditional B2B marketing approaches are losing effectiveness: "A lot of the traditional channels that used to work just don't work or are not efficient anymore. So paid SEM, traditional sponsorships of online content, writing blog posts in some big paper... a lot of these demand gen channels are just highly ineffective." Founders should prioritize breaking through with authentic founder-led storytelling rather than relying solely on conventional demand generation tactics.
- The economics of AI can reverse long-standing business practices: Regal AI's solution flips conventional contact center wisdom on its head. As Alex explains, "Instead of calls being the most expensive thing you have, AI calls are the cheapest channel you have. So you lead with those calls and you do as many calls as possible because it's cheaper than any other channel." B2B founders should look for opportunities where AI fundamentally changes the cost structure of traditional business operations.
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