Problem

Hey Telo addresses a persistent operational problem for Germany’s roughly one million craft businesses: phone calls and administrative work interrupt technicians and owners, while missed calls can mean missed service demand. The pain is especially acute for small heating, plumbing, air-conditioning, and electrical companies, where office capacity is limited and staff spend valuable time answering routine inquiries, recording customer details, and coordinating appointments instead of completing billable work.

The central use case is turning every incoming call into a handled customer interaction: answering naturally, capturing the request, scheduling an appointment, and passing complex questions to the right person. This reduces interruptions and paperwork while helping businesses remain reachable when their teams are on-site or outside normal office hours.

Product / Service

Hey Telo provides voice-first AI agents for the trades, positioned as a telephone and email AI that operates around the clock. It answers calls, recognizes or captures customer information, handles routine inquiries, schedules appointments, provides quotes, and hands complex cases to staff. The service is designed to work as an AI office assistant rather than merely a call-routing system.

Its key differentiation is workflow integration. Through connections with trade-management systems including pds, KWP, and mfr, Hey Telo can transfer call information into structured customer records, service orders, tasks, and appointments without manual re-entry. The benefit is continuous availability for customers and a more efficient back office for the trade business.

Market

Hey Telo operates in the vertical voice-AI and business-automation market, with an initial focus on Germany’s home-services and skilled-trades sector, particularly SHK and electrical businesses. It competes for the budget that trade companies might otherwise allocate to office staff, answering services, generic conversational-AI tools, or specialized field-service software. The supplied materials do not name specific direct competitors, but they position Hey Telo around deep integrations with the systems used by its target customers.

The company shows evidence of early customer traction: its website states that more than 300 SHK and electrical businesses trust Hey Telo. Y Combinator and Zeno Ventures are also identified as investors. The available research does not disclose revenue, ARR, growth rates, or customer economics, so the strongest supportable conclusion is that Hey Telo is an adopted, venture-backed early-stage product rather than a pre-launch concept, with financial traction still undisclosed.