Technology · HOLD.co portfolio
Phony.ai — an AI phone agent you configure, not a stack you’re locked into.
Phony is a provider-neutral AI phone and voice agent platform. The carrier, the speech-to-text, the language model and the voice are each a choice you make and can change, the phone line can stay on an account you already hold, and every call comes back itemised. It answers and returns calls for people who contacted you — and refuses to place the calls it cannot evidence consent for.
A HOLD.co company
Built by an operator that answers its own phones.
Phony.ai is a HOLD.co technology company, sitting alongside DEV.co, ERP.io, LLM.co, Automatic.co, RMA.ai, Search.co, RFP.co and Manufacturing.co in our technology segment.
It comes out of a problem the portfolio owns. HOLD.co operates brands across marketing, software, cybersecurity, legal, talent and finance, and every one of them lives on inbound enquiries that arrive by phone and by form. The response time on those enquiries is the single cheapest lever on revenue, and it is the one that quietly fails at the exact moments it matters — evenings, weekends and the weeks when the team is busiest.
The voice platforms on offer answered that with a closed stack and a blended rate. Phony was built the other way round: every layer a setting, the carrier optionally yours, the cost of each call visible on the call, and the compliance posture enforced by the software rather than described in a policy page.
The problem
The phone is the highest-value channel and the worst-run one.
Most businesses that depend on inbound calls are not short of demand. They are short of the minutes between an enquiry arriving and a person responding to it — and the tools sold to close that gap ask them to hand over the whole stack to do it.
The call still decides the deal
For a clinic, a law firm, a contractor or a dealership, the phone is where revenue is won and lost. It is also the channel most likely to ring out after hours, during a rush, or while the person who answers it is doing something else.
Speed to the caller beats everything else
A callback placed in minutes reaches a person who is still deciding; one placed the next morning reaches someone who has already called a competitor. Almost nothing else in a sales process moves the outcome as cheaply.
Voice platforms lock the stack shut
Most AI phone products pick the carrier, the speech engine, the model and the voice for you, bundle the whole thing into one number, and make any change a migration. When a layer reprices or a model regresses, the customer has no move to make.
Nobody can tell what a call cost
A blended per-minute rate hides four separate meters. A monthly average tells a finance team what was spent; it never tells them which call was expensive, or which layer made it that way.
How it works
Instruct, teach, test — and none of it is training a model.
No model is fine-tuned and none of your material is used to train one. The word for what happens here is instruction, and the distinction matters the first time someone asks where their data went.
01
Instruct
Write what the agent is for, what it must never do, and how to handle the calls you already know it will get. Plain instructions, changed in seconds, not a model configuration.
02
Teach
Give it your own material — pages, documents, the answers your team repeats all day. It answers from that rather than from a general impression of your industry.
03
Test
Run calls against the agent before a customer does. Read what it got wrong, change the instructions, and run them again until it holds up.
Provider-neutral
Four layers, and every one of them is yours to pick.
Switching a provider is a configuration change — not a migration, not a support ticket, and not a renegotiation. It is the part of the product that is hardest for a closed platform to copy, because it is a commercial decision as much as a technical one.
Telephony
Telnyx, Twilio, or a SIP trunk you already run. Numbers and minutes can sit on our carrier account or stay entirely on yours.
Speech to text
Deepgram, Google or Telnyx, chosen per agent — the layer that decides whether the agent understood a caller with background noise and an accent.
Language model
OpenAI, Anthropic or Google. The reasoning layer is a setting, so a model that regresses on your calls is a dropdown rather than a rebuild.
Voice
Cartesia, ElevenLabs, Google or OpenAI. Cloning a voice requires written authorisation from the person who owns it.
Telephony is the layer where that matters most commercially. Bring your own Twilio account or SIP trunk and the carrier bills you directly — and the transfer fee disappears entirely rather than being discounted, because you are already paying for that leg.
Consent
Phony will not place a call it cannot evidence consent for.
This is a property of the platform rather than a clause in the terms. There is no setting that turns it off, no plan that comes without it, and no screen anywhere for uploading a list. A call is permitted by one of three routes, and the record travels with the call.
They contacted you
They called, and this is the callback. The inbound call is itself the record.
Held by Phony, automaticallyThey submitted a form
On your own site, not a lead vendor's. The submission is the record.
Held by Phony, automaticallyThey are already a customer
An existing relationship — an open job, a booked appointment, a live account.
Held by you, from your own systemThere is deliberately no fourth route. A purchased list is a set of numbers with no record of how anyone on it agreed to anything, and once a product accepts one, every control upstream of it is decoration. Compliance with telemarketing law remains the caller’s obligation and no platform can assume it — what Phony can do is refuse to place the calls that create the exposure.
What Phony will not do
These are choices, not gaps.
Each one is published on phony.ai with the reasoning attached. If the use case is dialling strangers at volume, Phony is the wrong tool — and we would rather say so here than three weeks into an evaluation.
No cold calling
Phony calls people who contacted you, filled in a form on your own site, or already have a relationship with you.
No purchased or scraped lists
There is no list upload anywhere in the product, because there is no version of it we would approve.
No ringless voicemail
Dropping a message into a voicemail box without ringing the phone is not a feature here.
No political or advocacy calling
Out of scope by policy, not by omission.
No debt collection
Prohibited outright, not merely unbuilt.
No visitor surveillance
Phony does not record browsing sessions, does not fingerprint devices, and does not identify anonymous visitors by name or employer.
No voice cloning without authorisation
A cloned voice requires written permission from its owner, on file.
The platform
Ten features, each with a page that says where it doesn’t fit.
Nothing on this list is a roadmap item, and every one of them has a page on phony.ai stating the cases it handles badly. A product that only describes its strengths is not describable to a buyer who has to live with it.
Agents
One object holding the prompt, voice, model, number, tools and hours.
Knowledge
It answers from your material, not from an averaged view of your industry.
Actions
What the agent may actually do on a call — book, route, capture, transfer.
Testing
Talk to the agent before a customer does, and again after every change.
Calls and receipts
Every call, its transcript, and what each layer of it cost.
People
The contacts the agent captured, as structured fields rather than notes.
Reports
Volume, outcomes and cost over time.
Numbers and routing
Which line, which agent, which hours, and when a person takes it.
Human handoff
The agent knows when to stop and hand the call to someone.
Agencies
Run separate agents for your own clients, kept apart.
The receipt
One rate for the talking, and the carrier at cost.
Talk time is $0.12 a minute on every plan, and that single rate covers the three layers that make the agent speak — the speech-to-text, the model and the voice. It does not change when you upgrade, because a per-minute rate that moves on upgrade is a second ladder to explain for revenue the seat price already collects.
Telephony sits outside that rate and is never marked up. It is billed at what the carrier charges, on our account or on yours — and on your own Twilio, carrier or SIP trunk there is no transfer fee at all.
Phony is a module on the erp.io suite rather than a separate subscription, so the recurring price is a seat: $20 per user per month, with a 30-day trial and no card. Nothing inside the product is held back by plan — including the consent and retention controls, which are not the sort of thing that should be sold as an upgrade.
Every call then returns an itemised receipt: talk time, transfer time and telephony, priced separately and shown on the call itself. A monthly average tells a finance team what they spent. It never tells them which call was expensive.
How it’s built
The controls are the product, not a policy page.
Every item here is something that runs in the software and can be watched running, rather than a safeguard described in a document. A control that is written down but not enforced is worse than one that was never claimed.
Who it serves
Businesses where a missed call is a lost customer.
The pattern is the same across all of them: enquiries arrive by phone and by form, the response window is short, and the people best placed to answer are the ones already doing the work.
Where it doesn’t fit
The product turns away a category of buyer on purpose.
Outbound at volume to people who never asked to hear from you is the largest market in this category and the one Phony declines. There is no list upload, no consent attestation checkbox, and no cold-outreach mode — which removes a real share of the addressable market along with the share of the risk that comes with it.
Phony also holds no security or healthcare certification, and says so plainly rather than implying otherwise. Where a buyer’s requirement is an attestation rather than a control, that is a reason to wait — and the security questionnaire gets answered against what actually runs today.
The agent is a phone agent, not a general assistant. It answers, returns and routes calls, captures what the caller said as structured fields, and hands over to a person when it should stop. Work that belongs in a CRM, a scheduler or a ledger stays in those systems.
Our thesis
Voice is the first place AI is genuinely good enough to do the work, and the first place a bad actor can do real damage at scale. A platform that picks the narrower market — consented calls, an open stack, a cost you can read off the call — is the one still standing when the rules catch up.
Talk to the agent before you talk to us.
Phony.ai answers its own phone. Call the demo line on (206) 791-3840 and put the questions on this page to the product itself, or start a 30-day trial without a card.
Interested in the platform or the portfolio?
Whether you want an AI phone agent answering for your own business or you're an owner, operator, or investor exploring a deal with HOLD.co, start a confidential conversation.