We're bringing back the phone call.

Simple started inside Y Combinator. Cat and Zach met there running the software teams behind Startup School, Bookface, and YC's co-founder matching, with a front-row seat to the earliest LLM research previews, before anyone had applied them to voice.

In 2024, following a small tradition among YC staffers, they left to go through the batch themselves. The first product was a consumer assistant, an app that could wait on hold and navigate phone menus so you didn't have to. Businesses kept asking for the other side of that call. Pivot by pivot, Simple became the agent that picks up.

They built the entire voice stack from the ground up rather than assembling someone else's parts. It was the only way to control what matters on a phone call: latency, tone, the feeling that someone is actually listening. And they went deep with early customers. When Omaha Steaks signed on, the team ordered every cut in the catalog to know exactly what they were selling.

Today Simple's agents sell everything from steak to self storage to home insurance, and they convert up to 30% more often than trained reps. We're just getting started.