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PlaceCall (YC W26)

agentic API to call businesses and get things done

Details

External ID
49831231
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
—
Website domain
—
Launched
Sept. 24, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
16
Upvotes percentile
0.7001594896331739
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 28, 2026, 5:01 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 28, 2026, 5:01 p.m.

Description

Hi HN, this is Yarik and Vlad from VOYGR - we are building the tools for agents and apps to engage with local businesses.It all started with our own pain point at VOYGR: calling businesses to verify if they are open. We are both from Google (Maps and Search) and even there, the merchants and venues don’t keep this info updated. So we built an API and started using it in-house.On July 4th, we were driving through Portland looking for a place to eat. Google Maps was saying “Holiday hours may vary”. We tried some AI assistant apps (Poke was trending back then), and they couldn’t help. Our API found 15 Thai and sushi places and called it in parallel. A few confirmed that they are open today and are taking walk-ins. One was marked closed on Google. The app can find the restaurant, but someone has to answer the phone.This is the problem we kept seeing. Assistants can’t do much in the real world where the phone number is still a major communication interface. Muse added calls in beta mode, but it’s still calling only one place at a time. There are a bunch of tools to create your own voice agents, but nothing that can work simply out of the box. We’ve built PlaceCall to fit all your agentic needs. Give it a task in plain English and a US phone number (or a list of numbers) - it navigates phone menus, waits for you on hold, and returns a structured response with outcome, recording and transcript. If you don’t have a phone number, just describe what you need and PlaceCall comes up with the recommendations. Here is the demo: https://youtu.be/7ZbVCPv8Wq0?si=LoLxxx1M7nhS7_j-When PlaceCall API was tested in our hackathon, we had the following use cases implemented by the developers: checking if a doctor accepts new patients, getting quotes for car service, and running quick surveys. The API can be used through Claude Code and Codex; examples and setup are listed in the repo: https://github.com/voygr-tech/placecall We give the first 250 calls free. Product page is here: https://voygr.tech/placecall/Try it and let us know how it goes. We are interested in learning what you would use it for and what is missing. We are here all day and happy to answer any questions. Our email: [email protected]

Enrichment

Theme
ai agents for calls and meetings
Vertical
Horizontal
Function
Agent / copilot
Audience
Developer
AI stance
AI-native
Project type
Commercial product
Normalized one-liner
api for voice agents to call businesses
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

Partial Building an API wrapper around voice agents is manageable, but reliable automated business calling requires overcoming complex automated phone trees (IVR), human gatekeepers, and carrier filtering.

What it would actually take: Architected using programmable SIP telephony (Twilio/Telnyx) hooked into streaming WebSockets handling real-time speech-to-speech models or pipelined STT/LLM/TTS. The hard technical hurdle is creating an autonomous agent capable of reliably negotiating erratic human conversations, accents, background noise, hold music detection, and multi-tier IVR navigation.

Discussion

2 comments analyzed.

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 20 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #11 of 21 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 319 days after the earliest competitor.

Other launches for this product

Same idea, different domain

Nobody's really built a agent / copilot tool for Agriculture yet.