Granet: Bland AI avoids OpenAI and Anthropic, building proprietary stack
Isaiah Granet · 180 VCs rejected him—then a $60K billboard got him to $2M ARR in 4 months. | Isaiah Granet, CEO o... · PMF Show · Apr 20, 2026 · at 6:05
Isaiah Granet is the CEO of Bland AI, a voice AI platform. He discusses Bland AI's technical architecture and security model for enterprise phone calls.
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“We don't use open AI, Anthropic, anybody else. So we're entirely built from the ground up.”
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More from Isaiah Granet
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“We got to two million dollars of revenue by the end of April. We raised our series A from scale venture partners in June. And then immediately afterwards, we turned around and we fired 50% of our customers. And we dropped down to sub a million dollars of reven…”
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“So we basically sort of in that moment were able to go, Hey, we think this is the first instance where AI has like fully essentially replaced a call center.”
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“The total amount was roughly a 180 investors over three weeks I met with, and I got more or less all of them saying no, and their number one piece of feedback Which was soul crushing was we don't think people will be doing phone calls a year from now. This was…”
Granet: Total phone call volume will grow exponentially due to AI automation
“And what we believe fundamentally is that the number of phone calls that happen will actually grow exponentially because it will become so painless and pleasant that you'll actually prefer picking up the phone because it will be the quickest path to resolution…”
Granet: Enduring businesses are built around customer pain, not customer hope
“These business owners don't have pain. They have hope. And I know that sounds weird, right? Like you want to be with hopeful people. Yes. But where you build a great business is by figuring out where, when you press, does it hurt?”