The D1 Athlete Who Built a $100M Voice AI Company

How Will Bodewes did it: The D1 Athlete Who Built a $100M Voice AI Company

Will is the co-founder and CEO of Phonely. The simplest way he describes it: "we allow you to answer your phone with AI that talks exactly like a person." If you have a receptionist or use a call center, Phonely can automate "about 80 or 90%" of those workflows and save you "about 70%" of what you'd be paying. What it's really good at, Will says, is reliability of voice agents when you have 10, 15, 20, 30,000 calls a day and you want to make sure every single call gets handled perfectly.

Before any of this, Will was an athlete. The shortest race he's ever finished is 300 miles ridden without sleep. Before that he competed in cross country skiing at the highest level of US college sports and qualified for the national championship — only for the race to get cancelled in his senior year, his last chance to make it. He'd missed it freshman, sophomore and junior year; this was finally the one. "It felt like unfinished business," he says. "That was just completely taken from me." It put a chip on his shoulder — "I still still gotta make it still got something to prove" — and that chip carried into what he's doing today.

He spent his whole life in the US, then landed in Melbourne to do a PhD in machine learning, where he met his co-founder Nissan and where the idea for Phonely started. It wasn't his first company. Right out of college he built a hardware startup called Spoke Sound, turning flat surfaces and artwork into high fidelity speakers — it even attracted Chance the rapper and had a genuine patent. He closed it down. The lessons stuck: he didn't feel like he was solving a problem, and "I had I was creating a nice to have." With his next startup he wanted to solve a real problem businesses or people have. He also learned the idea you work on is actually really important, "because best case scenario you're gonna start to see success in like three to five years."

Phonely started small — small businesses paying 30 to 100 dollars a month, a fast feedback loop, thousands of customers — because that's what they could get and, honestly, "the product wasn't good enough." Then a single call center signed on and paid more than all of them combined, and the company went up market. The early days were brutal: about a year and a half ago, "like 30% of our calls were just not working." The customers stuck with them anyway, built on relationships — daily meetings, 5 in the morning calls — and a simple promise: "we're not gonna make you pay for stuff that's not working." One of those customers now pays Phonely "like $78,000 a month."

They got into Y Combinator in the summer of 2024 and raised a seed round they didn't announce because they were too busy working. While the AI funding market went into a frenzy, they kept their heads down. Will is competitive, and it was hard — but he stepped back and reframed it: "comparison is the thief of joy." On a sticky note on his desk from day one he'd written "there are no shortcuts for you," attributed to Bo Davis. The Series A came from a LinkedIn post about cycling — Base Ten's Caroline saw it, reached out, and months later Phonely had 16 million and a 100 mil valuation. On the personal cost, Will says: "I've missed out on like two years of my life," but the path gives him optionality to do whatever he wants for the rest of it.

What you'll hear

• What Phonely actually does — answer your phone with AI that talks like a person, automating "about 80 or 90%" of receptionist and call center workflows and saving "about 70%"
• The cancelled race that left a chip — qualifying for the national championship in his senior year, the race getting cancelled, and how that "something to prove" carried into Phonely
• Why he shut down Spoke Sound — the hardware speaker startup that attracted Chance the rapper, and the lesson that he'd built "a nice to have," not a real problem worth solving
• Starting small on purpose — 30 to 100 dollar small business customers, thousands of them, because "the product wasn't good enough" and reps mattered more than revenue
• The 30% failure era — when "30% of our calls were just not working," the 5 in the morning calls, and why he didn't charge customers for what wasn't working
• The LinkedIn-post Series A — a post about cycling that led Base Ten's Caroline to reach out and a round that put Phonely at 16 million and a 100 mil valuation
• Don't be a founder (unless you have to) — his blunt advice that you should only do it if you feel so strongly that you have no choice

Key claims from this episode

Chapters

Quotes from this episode

Themes Will returns to

• Athlete turned founder — Will keeps returning to ultra endurance, the cancelled race, and the chip on his shoulder as the engine behind Phonely
• A real problem, not a nice to have — the Spoke Sound lesson that he wanted to solve a real problem businesses or people have
• Reliability at scale — handling tens of thousands of calls a day with low latency and phones up 100% of the time is the whole product
• Relationships over commercials — daily meetings, 5 in the morning calls, and not charging for what wasn't working kept the early customers
• No shortcuts — the Bo Davis sticky note and "nothing in life has ever really been handed to me"
• Know the game you're playing — if you play the venture capital game, you go super hard, super big, in a risky volatile space