Will he raise funds in Germany for his AI startup? It's almost impossible. Do you grow millions a week in Silicon Valley? easy.
It builds voice AI agents for call centres, customer service and other use cases, according to Kevin Wu, co-founder and CEO of Leaping AI. He founded the company in Germany in 2023 and founded Arkadiy Telegin, co-founder and CTO Leaping AI. The company completed its funding earlier this year after joining Y Combinator.
Leaping AI has raised $4.7 million in seed funding, led by Nexus Venture Partners. Other investors include Paul Graham, co-founders of Y Combinator, Shopify Coo Kaz Nejatian, and founders of Ritual Capital, Pioneer Fund, Orange Collective, and Voice AI platform Cartecia.
Currently based in San Francisco, WU quit his job as a consultant for the Boston Consulting Group in Berlin and founded the company. He said he was partly inspired by his experience as an intern at Amazon many years ago.
“It was a very unrewarded job,” he said.
According to the company, the industry has expanded from AI customers to industries, from travel to home services to health insurance and real estate, with its voice agents currently processing 10,000 calls per day. For one client, a large travel agency, AI said 50% of repeated booking-related calls can be handled without human help. Their AI agents also achieved customer satisfaction of over 90%, the company said.
Leaping AI will use seed funding to expand its teams to the product and market, strengthen the capabilities of its agents, and scale its scale to meet demand.
Funding in Germany vs Silicon Valley
Initially, the founders of the leaping AI tried to raise funds in Germany. There, Wu grew up and went to school, but it was hard.
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“It's very difficult to find a company in Germany because there's no early stage seed venture capital for technology founders with unproven companies,” he said.
Then, at the end of 2024, after being rejected twice and moved to San Francisco, Leaping AI was accepted by the Y Combinator.
“Our revenue essentially doubled within the first two months of coming here, so in Germany we've increased revenue in two months than a year,” he said.
Jumping AI recently said it has surpassed $1 million in its recurring annual revenues.
When it was time to raise money in Silicon Valley after becoming part of the Y Combinator, Wu said he held one meeting a day on a 30-minute block for five consecutive days. By the end of the first week, he said they had raised $4.7 million and had more offers. He said they cancelled the second week of the meeting they planned.
“At this point, almost everyone said 'Yes,'” Wu said.
Wu said he left the Y Combinator and with Graham's support, he made all the difference, quickly expanding his network, and making the startup attractive for investors.
“Paul Graham is Kobe Bryant, a startup,” he said. “If Paul Graham invests, people usually see it as a very good indication.”
Y Combinator has invested heavily in AI. The latest cohort of Startup Accelerator is dominated by AI startups run by Young Founders. Y Combinator invests $500,000 in all its companies accepting, and its alumni include Airbnb, Coinbase and Doordash.
The Jumping AI also benefited from its already existed for a year and added that it has more traction than some of the other companies in the Y-combinator cohort run by recent university graduates.
He said that going to Silicon Valley, like himself, would be a dream for a German computer science alumni, and would encourage other founders to make it happen. He said that if you can't enter the Y Combinator, the founder can make his own luck.
“You can literally fly here for a month, get to know investors and get to fund it with the promise of moving to sci-fi. It's much easier once you have the money from the investor.”
“I think YC is a good way to come to the US,” he said. “But that's not the only way.”
Wu said that the jumping AI is based in the US and is actually easy to sell products to German homes.
“You are seen as having German roots and speaking their language, but you are a Silicon Valley company,” he said, adding, “You are seen as setting innovation.”
