This Founder Raised $4.2 million to Fix Customer Support with AI

Manav: Alex Maramenos, he's the founder of Intrai, a YC-backed company — they're building an AI-powered quality assurance agent. Is that a right explanation for your company?

Alex: I'd say probably closer to: we're using AI to automate quality assurance for customer support.

Manav: Me and Alex had a really good workout in the sauna before this — quick disclaimer, I want to do more workouts on the podcast with other YC founders, and I loved it. Alex was really into calisthenics, and now he's building companies from two different countries — London and San Francisco, right?

Alex: That's right, and we also have a big presence in Athens, Greece.

Manav: By the way, that workout was a great fitness check to decide which guest I'm going to bring on the podcast — it's kind of like the preliminary round. So how do you juggle between London and SF — tell me everything.

Alex: It's something really new to me, honestly. We were previously based entirely in London. As we started growing the team, we got into YC, so we needed to be in the Bay Area for the batch — we really enjoyed it, saw the benefits, and started gradually branching out. We grew the team mainly in Greece, because of the connections we have there — all the founders are Greek — and there's strong engineering talent. But we also kept a hub in London, both for clients and partners, and because there's a lot of talent there too.

Eventually I decided to move myself, as CEO, to the Bay Area, because of the ecosystem — so many people building so many cool things, I felt this was the right place for me to be. So I'm planning to split my time, probably half in SF and some of it around Europe, seeing the team, seeing customers, but SF is my base, and gradually we're going to transition the company that way too.

Manav: I think there are two types of companies when it comes to customer support. There are companies like Apple, where you can just request a callback, and then there are companies that create this black hole where it's basically impossible to get a human on the line, using AI mostly to filter fewer and fewer people through to an actual person. That's anecdotal, maybe, but I think of it as good customer experience — I'm not going to name providers, actually I will name one, Amex. I use Amex, and they always have phenomenal support, and I think that's because of training, because of quality assurance — they have really solid systems in place to make sure every conversation feels unique and that you feel welcomed. Compared to, say, when I talk to my big banks — I won't name them, since it's negative feedback — I always feel like they just want to get rid of me rather than actually hear me out, and that's not how I want to feel about something I'm paying a lot of money for.

Alex: Exactly — I want to feel like they actually want to hear me out and help, that's the whole reason I'm using the service.

Manav: Let's talk about the product and business model — how does it actually work for a company to plug in Intrai? How automated is it — can they just upload all their customer data and it breaks it down into a structured, easy-to-understand report?

Alex: That's right, in a sense. Quality assurance is actually an old problem, a function that's existed for a while — historically managed on spreadsheets. Think of the classic manual workflow: somebody collects tickets, collects data points, becomes a "spreadsheet ninja," builds pivot tables, and then tries to share that across teams. It's burdensome and hard to digest and circulate across an organization.

With our software, first, we're not consumer-facing — we're a layer that sits on top of the help desk or call center software companies already use, so we're not exposed to the end customer, at least not currently. Operational excellence or customer support leadership teams plug our software on top of their help desk — it's an easy API integration, usually about ten minutes, basically one click. We ingest all the tickets, and then we offer a UI where organizations configure their criteria, what they usually call scorecards. Every organization has a checklist their agents need to follow when talking to a customer — compliance, tone of voice, language used, process adherence, whether that's soft skills and communication or operationally driven criteria. We let them configure all of that.

The next step is understanding and sampling which conversations they want reviewed — this is another key part of what we do. We let them create a lot of custom rules — "evaluate all conversations that got a negative review," or "conversations open longer than X time," or "conversations touched by more than five or six people." There's a lot of configurability there. Then they choose whether AI evaluates all of these conversations — we offer hybrid models, which is a hot take I can get into later on how human-AI collaboration is going to look over the next few years. Eventually they can extract insights from all that data — what's going wrong in conversations, why, which teams are performing best, which need coaching, how that coaching is progressing — because we bundle all of that on the platform, from data ingestion to evaluation to reporting to coaching, creating that flywheel of improvement.

That's how I feel about this whole AI revolution generally — companies are going to get leaner, but they're also going to get collectively more intelligent. A lot of our customers used to hire, and still do, BPOs — business process outsourcers.

Manav: I thought BPOs were basically the call centers in the Philippines and India.

Alex: That's right, though there are plenty in the US too, and a ton in Central Europe. This can run into the millions of dollars a year for an organization, but what we're seeing now is a lot of organizations wanting to bring that in-house — like you said, they can 10x their team's output with AI and put much stricter controls in place. If you run a call center as an outsourced service and you're also providing the quality assurance on top of it, I'm sure everyone means well, but it's a bit like the evaluator checking themselves. A lot of organizations want that objective, third-party view, and would rather keep it in-house.

Manav: I have a lot of employees in the Philippines, and one thing I've noticed is that because of these AI tools, they're really good now — writing near-perfect English, and so on. But I always think companies are going to get rid of more and more people over time, because overhead is the biggest expense — paying salaries, benefits, insurance. How do you personally feel about companies getting rid of more and more customer service people?

Alex: I think it's twofold. Companies are definitely getting leaner — it's funny, it was in the news that Salesforce is cutting a thousand jobs while simultaneously hiring salespeople to sell AI. I think we'll see a shift in what skills are required for jobs, but I also think customer experience overall is becoming more digital — more interactions happen online, and yes, you can automate a portion of that with chatbots and AI, but you'll still have a lot of volume flowing into customer support teams for complex or unexpected cases.

I think we'll see automation on the basic stuff — what we call L1 interactions, "where can I find this statement," simple questions like that. But when things go wrong, and AI isn't yet very capable of handling unexpected workflows and giving a deterministic answer, you'll still need human teams — AI tools will augment human capability rather than fully replace it. In our case, for example, a human QA reviewer used to be able to do maybe 100 evaluations a week; now we can get them to 150, because they use our tool, the AI drafts an evaluation, and the human just reviews and refines it — the job gets much easier.

Manav: Before, it was like manually reading every single customer service transcript — I can only imagine how boring that gets. Let's talk AI models real quick, then segue into agents — how do you personally feel about using the OpenAI API, which I know can get expensive really fast, and about the open-source wave coming with new models from Llama and DeepSeek out of China? I'm sure you guys are discussing this internally on an ongoing basis.

Alex: It's exciting — I wake up pumped every day, like, "what happened today?" We're pretty confident in foundational model APIs, OpenAI's included. I view foundational models the way I'd have viewed the cloud 10 or 15 years ago — everything is built on top of AWS or GCP now, and I think you'll similarly have OpenAI, Anthropic, a handful of major foundational model providers, running things as a fully managed service, similar to the choice between running your own servers versus going to a cloud provider.

We're running on foundational models right now, a mix of the major ones, and we're always thinking about testing some open-source models too. The challenge is you then have to maintain and self-manage them, and I don't want to overclaim, but I think the pace OpenAI and companies like it are moving is so fast that even if we managed our own open-source model, I believe OpenAI would reach the same improvements before we could, and we're better off riding that wave.

The founder of Perplexity put it well — every company in the late '90s and 2000s was an "internet wrapper" company, then everybody became a "cloud wrapper" company. I think now every company is becoming a kind of "foundational model wrapper" company. That underlying infrastructure is going to fuel the next generation of applications, and I think those applications are going to be agentic.

Manav: You said agentic — let's talk about agents.

Alex: Let's do it.

Manav: I'm building an AI agent right now that's going to post news on Twitter nonstop — sounds like spam, I'm joking. Twitter's a love-hate relationship for me, but I've noticed it's where you get news fastest.

Alex: Yeah, it needs to be snappy, short, quick, hot off the press — and a lot of people have already built AI agents for Twitter. There are going to be more and more platforms with AI agents, agents in every vertical.

Manav: What excites you personally about AI agents? We don't want to spam social media with a bunch of agents — we need to balance human content with AI content.

Alex: It's really hard to predict exactly what's going to happen — anyone confidently forecasting the next five or six years is probably shooting in the dark, unless they have real insider knowledge. But for the next two or three years, I think we'll see a lot of low-skill, repetitive jobs get fully replaced — maybe basic accounting, that kind of thing. That's going to power a lot of productivity gains in middle and upper management, because right now computing power is automating a lot of repetitive work, but judgment and decision-making aren't automated yet.

I think agentic workflows are going to produce far more information, more speed of execution, and that accelerates decision-making at the upper layers of organizations. Over the next three to five years, maybe longer, I think we'll start seeing some automation of judgment too. Have you seen YC's request for startups — they're now asking for "B2A," business-to-agents? I think the fundamental shift happens once LLMs, or AI generally, start becoming the actual end user or consumer of a product, rather than just a tool humans use — because up until now, humans have always been the buyer.

Manav: But you'd still need human judgment somewhere.

Alex: You would, because of emotional implications and a lot of nuance — but the moment automation starts, and honestly it's already begun in algorithmic trading — you have algorithms trading with human oversight, human logic built in, but happening so fast that a manual human trader is genuinely very hard to out-compete.

Manav: Milliseconds. Wow. I was talking to the founder of Argil AI, Lais — he also went through YC — and he gave a really good example of agents: someone built a "writer's room" with ten different agents that basically argued with each other, like a real writer's room for a movie, where you all argue: why does this scene exist, it shouldn't, there needs to be conflict, there needs to be resolution. So this person set up ten agents arguing with each other to come up with a TV show script. That was a really good example — reasoning and logic are getting better and better, and that's where it gets genuinely exciting for me. I always joke that I only really talk to two people a day — ChatGPT and DeepSeek.

Alex: [laughs] I don't want to derail us, but this is an interesting point — I think this is genuinely how human collective knowledge has always evolved, by refining ideas, batting them off against each other, and that's what organizations do too, get teams together, and the best idea emerges if there's real meritocracy in the room. I believe LLMs and AI generally can just accelerate that process so much faster. I don't know when AGI happens, I don't have the keys to that, but when it does, I think we'll reach truth so much faster — and every moment you reach truth, you can act on a decision, and when decision-making speeds up that much, it accelerates everything. I'm really excited about that.

Manav: Awesome. I could talk AI and agents for hours, but I also want the audience to hear more about you as a person — the show's called Emerging Founders, and I think the most important thing is for people to learn about the founder themselves. Can we go back to your journey — you grew up in Greece?

Alex: I did.

Manav: What did you study in college, and what was your journey right after?

Alex: I lived in Greece until I was 26. I studied political science in my hometown, Thessaloniki, Greece's second-largest city, up in the north — a big student city, about a million people, a lot of fun.

Manav: Is it a coastal city?

Alex: It is, some beautiful beaches, a wonderful place, great food. What happened is I come from an entrepreneurial background — both my parents ran their own SMB businesses, they were in publications, TV production, event production. I was around that since I was a kid, from very early on, and I was always fascinated by it, looking up to my parents, and I got involved as early as I could. I started organizing my own music and arts festival back in Greece — mainly street art, hip-hop, a lot of extreme sports, a lot of music generally. I was 23 when I launched it, ran it for five years, and that took up the majority of my student years while studying full-time.

Manav: Tell me more about this festival, this sounds exciting — is it like Coachella, or what exactly is it?

Alex: I wish it were like Coachella — that was the dream, honestly. I play music, studied it as a kid.

Manav: What instrument?

Alex: Guitar. I was always fascinated by festivals and music, a deep passion of mine, still is to a big extent, and there was no festival in my country bringing together a lot of young artists from different backgrounds. I really wanted that, couldn't find it, and decided I'd create it myself. I didn't know a huge number of people, but I had some great friends and artists from my hometown, still do, and we all pulled together and said, let's just do it, make it free for people to come and join, I don't care how, I'll find the money and fund it myself.

The first year, there was no entrance ticket at all — we just collected sponsorships.

Manav: What was the venue like?

Alex: An old, abandoned military camp — we got permission from the municipality at the time, hired a company to build a decent, big-enough stage. I did have some connections, and my parents, being in the industry, helped with that too. We threw this big party and ended up with four or five thousand people showing up, and people loved it. This was 2013, I was 23, and everyone was saying there was nothing like it anywhere around, we had to keep doing it. So the next year we doubled it, and then we obviously needed a real budget, because we wanted to bring bigger artists and actually pay them, so we introduced a ticket, and it grew into a three-day festival. I got a scholarship from the Bosch Foundation that took me to Berlin, where I was able to shadow a lot of club and festival owners there and learn from them. I kept funding it and growing it, and eventually it grew to 400 artists from all over the world, including graffiti artists, dancers.

Manav: How did you monetize it?

Alex: There was a ticket, plus sponsorships, plus an admission fee for some parts. It was a three-day festival, a lot of fun — there's still a lot of material online, I'll send you some. I don't really promote it anymore, it's a different part of my life, but I'm very proud of it, and it was great fun.

Manav: Greece is known for its financial crash and a lot of inflation —

Alex: [laughs] You're poking at that.

Manav: — by the way, I have to say, I love Greek food.

Alex: That makes two of us — there's a place called Nick the Greek, I always order from there.

Manav: I love Greek food too, maybe we'll grab some right after this. But tell me more about what happened during the financial crash.

Alex: Oh man, you're taking me back — I don't think your audience is going to be super familiar with Greek political history or economics, but there was a huge global crash in 2008, which eventually trickled down and Greece essentially went bankrupt — we had capital controls. That happened right in the middle of me organizing the festival. The government went bankrupt, there was a lot of outstanding debt, the IMF came in, austerity measures were applied, a lot of payments went outstanding — the country didn't technically default, but it was a default in every practical sense. We had to borrow money just to pay outstanding debts to the European Union. We could record a whole separate podcast about it, honestly.

But anyway, that was happening in the middle of me running the festival — I had something like half a million dollars in outstanding receivables and payables, and everything froze. I was about 23 years old, and I can't fully describe the stress. I had support from my co-organizers and the team, but it's funny — I actually ended up in the hospital during this. There was so much happening that I had a kind of stress shock, and one morning I woke up and half my body was paralyzed while I was having breakfast. My roommate at the time thought I was joking, making fun of something, and started laughing — that's what stress can do to a body. It taught me a lot about stress management, how to set boundaries, how to prioritize my time, how to make decisions and not get overwhelmed by what's happening every day, because I think life only gets more stressful, especially the more ambitious you are, the more you push. It's a skill I'm always trying to improve on.

Manav: That's a good segue into wellness. I'm personally obsessed with health and wellness — sauna, steam, working out, you motivate me on Instagram getting the steps in, we both use the Whoop band. How do you manage your stress levels right now, and how do you balance this fast-paced life where you don't have time for anything against the need to intentionally slow down so you actually feel present? What do you do to de-stress and keep that balance?

Alex: It's a huge thing for me, probably the most important thing in my life over the past four or five years. This is going to sound a bit funny, but at some point I got so stressed, especially after first moving to London, trying to find my footing, going through job interviews while studying at the same time, that I started smoking, and I'd go out with friends and end up having three or four pints — nothing too excessive, but daily. I still prioritized the gym, but eventually I noticed I was running low on energy, and at some point I drew a line — quit smoking, didn't do it for too long overall.

I built this regime where I go to the gym every day no matter what. I realized the more I did that, the more I wanted a really structured schedule — waking up at 5 a.m., which I know sounds like the classic playbook of a 30-year-old co-founder — going straight to the gym, taking a cold shower, doing my sauna, reading, making sure I take care of my body and mind before I give myself to the rest of the world and the day. It's a bit more volatile now with time zones and traveling between places, needing to be present for customers and my team, but I always make sure I take at least two hours a day to work out, and I try to eat as clean as I can, because I can clearly see my performance drops when I don't, and that stops benefiting my company, my team, and the people around me.

One really important thing alongside all that is community — your partner, the people around you. If they're not supporting you through it, you're bound to struggle, in my opinion. It's genuinely important to surround yourself with like-minded people — might sound like a cliché, but your environment can be a huge factor in whether you achieve the lifestyle you actually want.

Manav: Man, that's the whole reason I started this podcast — to be around other founders and other smart people. I also feel like a lot of founders live this lonely lifestyle, almost like an AA meeting, all of us going through stuff without a real outlet to release that energy — that's why this is great.

Alex: I love it — it's one of the main reasons I wanted to move somewhere with like-minded people, that sense of community. It does feel like that since I moved. I lived in London for eight years and loved it, but avoiding the gray London weather —

Manav: LA and SF haven't been treating me too kindly lately either, with all this rain from the tropical storm — but generally the weather's great here, everything's great.

Alex: That's beautiful, man.

Manav: I really want to talk more about co-founding, finding a great co-founder — I've personally noticed that's the hardest thing, finding the right one, and YC intentionally backs a lot of really strong co-founding teams, two or three people, rarely just solo founders. Can you talk about how you met your co-founders, and the dynamic you guys have?

Alex: It sounds too good to be true, but my co-founders are my best friends. We all met in London — coincidentally, we're all Greek, even though I like to say I don't only hang out with Greeks, it just happened that we're like-minded and met through our network. We were all early employees at Revolut at the time — Dei, my CTO, was on the team that built the core banking platform there, and George —

Manav: What does Revolut do again, can you explain?

Alex: Revolut is probably the largest digital bank in the world right now, one of the very first successful neobanks, headquartered in London, now serving something like 50 million customers globally. I'm giving them a great pitch here — hopefully Nikolay's watching this and gives me some credit for it.

Starting a company with your best friends, when you have that kind of dynamic, is genuinely the best thing.

Manav: But how do you keep each other accountable, and not get too comfortable?

Alex: A few things — we learned how to work as a co-founding team, even though we're great friends, we've gone through stages, still do. Two things really matter: zero ego, and how you get there is by trusting that the other person is coming from a good place, that we're fully aligned on what we're trying to achieve, so whatever I say to them or they say to me comes from a place of shared, mutual commitment to the goal. That helps us resolve conflict very fast, keeps us bonded, and lets us make decisions quickly — that's how we run the team.

Manav: What's the next phase for Intrai — can you talk about the fundraising journey, and what you guys are most heavily focused on next?

Alex: By the way, we got rejected by YC twice — there was actually a third rejection, but for a different project we can talk about another time. We started in 2023, raised our pre-seed round from two investors, Episode 1 led it, E2VC followed, plus a few select angels from our network — that was $1.1 million, raised in London. Great investors, and I'm not just saying that to flatter them — I think finding great investors is genuinely as hard as finding great co-founders. These people have believed in us from minute one, never questioned us, always there to help and keep us accountable.

We decided applying to YC would benefit us mainly for the ecosystem and network exposure. Got rejected twice, refined our go-to-market, refined our ICP, closed our first big client — deel.com, at the time, who's been a great design partner and extremely helpful — and that got us into YC. Tom Blomfield is our partner, who has a lot of relevant exposure, being the founder of Monzo, another very successful UK neobank — he's seen those customer support and QA cost issues firsthand, knew the problem well, liked our vision, and got us in.

We went through the batch, built the product, built pipeline, closed a couple more enterprise contracts, and then went out to raise our seed round, which we closed in late October — we just announced it recently. Same investors participated again, and we also added General Catalyst, Sequoia Scout, Activant Capital, plus a few more angels, mainly YC founders, since we felt those people have great relevant experience and wanted to be closer to that ecosystem too.

What we're most excited about right now: first, building the best AI QA product in the market — we already hear that from our customers, "you guys are the best, we've never seen anything like this." But we've only been building this for about six months, there's so much more to build, especially around customizability — letting companies plug and play their own quality assurance frameworks, rather than forcing them into whatever our software assumes. That takes a lot of surrounding infrastructure. The next step is pushing toward more agentic workflows, and eventually becoming the "brain" of operations for customer support teams — daily digests, alerts for executives, all the insights we can surface. We want to be the intelligence layer for how a customer support organization runs.

Manav: Love that, man — you guys are intense people.

Alex: [laughs] Competition isn't for losers.

Manav: This is great — I like how heavily focused you are on one single thing, wanting to be the master of it.

Alex: Yes.

Manav: What's a book you've given most as a gift, and why — and what are one to three books that have really influenced your life, that basically changed you as a person after reading them?

Alex: I don't want to sound pretentious, but I genuinely love reading, and it's something that really helped me break out of a scarcity mindset into an abundance mindset. The most-gifted book has to be The Almanack of Naval Ravikant. I love Naval, it helped me get centered and figure out what I actually want much faster — I think a lot of us, myself included, struggle to admit to ourselves what we truly want, and that creates a lot of stress. That book helped me get there faster.

The second, which ties into my top three: Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand — I think her whole philosophy of objectivism is phenomenal, it really changed how I see value in things and how I give value to people. To me, a relationship, not in a transactional or cynical sense, is fundamentally about value exchange — approaching a new relationship by offering something first always opens up more opportunities for a deeper connection. Similar to how you approached me, actually — you reached out and said, "I've seen these two or three things, I want to do this with you," which was you offering value up front. Now that we've met and hung out and I've seen how you work, I can see that clearly.

The third is The Case Against Reality by Donald Hoffman, a neuroscientist in California — it completely changed my perspective on perception, made me realize that whatever we perceive isn't necessarily "real," it's just how we perceive and explain things. That's helped me try to see things from someone else's perspective, which helps me resolve conflict faster, or avoid it entirely — and at the end of the day, I think that makes me smarter, because if I see something a new way, initially disagree, but can adopt that new perspective, I've learned something and can move forward.

Manav: I love that. By the way, I've given the Naval book to something like ten people myself.

Alex: You must be right about that. My actual goal is to get him on the podcast one day — his episode with Joe Rogan was, in my opinion, the best podcast episode ever, I've relistened to it maybe ten times.

Manav: I've listened to all of his podcast appearances, I love him too. Next question — what purchase of $100 or less has positively impacted your life in the last six months? Could be anything, a gadget, a course, an app.

Alex: It's tough, I try to stay pretty lean and frugal with purchases — at the risk of sounding pretentious again, I'd say Harvard's CS50 course. It's an online course on computing and coding, and I took it because even though I've worked semi-technical jobs and in tech companies, I'm not an engineer, and I always felt I needed to understand the underlying infrastructure — how things work generally in life, not just with computers. How processes work, how people work, how industries work. That course gave me a much better understanding of how engineering actually works, which also improved my communication with my co-founders and my ability to understand technical issues. I think it's a necessary thing for any tech founder — you need at least a solid foundational understanding of how things work, and it really changed how I process information and make decisions while building a company.

Manav: I love that — it makes you a better communicator, understanding things from first principles.

Alex: Exactly.

Manav: How has an apparent failure set you up for later success — something that felt like a failure in the moment, but looking back, you realized you had to go through it?

Alex: Another vulnerable one — I'd consider my festival a failure, at the time, because in its last year, even though we'd grown a lot, I wanted to take it in a different direction, and I didn't really listen to my audience. That taught me, first and foremost, to always listen to what the market actually wants. It also put me through a lot of hardship and helped keep my ego in check, and I think that built a lot more resilience in me. Now I actively lean into pain, actively look for the failure — whatever makes me uncomfortable, I know that's probably what I need to do, within reason, obviously, I don't want to wipe myself out with excessive risk. But that hardship, that resilience-building exercise, has genuinely helped me become more resilient overall.

Manav: Great answer. I want to know — ideally, what kind of companies is Intrai looking for, so people listening can reach out after hearing this?

Alex: Thank you — consumer enterprises, post-Series A all the way up to larger enterprise; I'd say right now, pre-IPO is probably our sweet spot. Think fintech, neobanks, retailers, airlines — any business with a large volume of customers who need urgent, high-quality support, and who don't want to leave those customers stuck in endless loops. Those are the companies we want to help, and who can help us grow alongside them.

Manav: Amazing. How can people find you, what social platforms are you on right now?

Alex: You can find us, Intrai, on X — the website is www.intrai.com. We're also on X and LinkedIn — my personal handle is Alex Maramenos on both. I usually respond pretty quickly, and I love talking to people in the customer support industry, or other founders in general.

Manav: Thank you for watching another episode of Emerging Founders — I had a great conversation with Alex, and I'll see you guys in the next one.

Alex: Thank you so much for having me, it was good fun.