Salt Lake City — Lovage Labs has been accepted into the Winter 2022 Y Combinator batch. Lovage Labs is a rapidly growing startup headquartered in Lehi, Utah developing virtual receptionists and phone automation software.  

Headquartered in Mountain View, California, Y Combinator is the leading startup accelerator program. It has been used to assist more than 3,000 companies, including Stripe, Reddit, Airbnb, Twitch, DoorDash, Dropbox, Coinbase, and Silicon Slopes superstars Podium and Weave. Y Combinator provides assistance through an intensive 3-month bootcamp that provides direct mentorship and feedback from other experienced founders and invests $500,000.00 in each company.

“We are humbled to be accepted into the world’s top start-up accelerator,” says Austin Petersen, co-founder, and CEO of Lovage Labs. “The acceleration of growth and mentorship that we’ve experienced with this great founder’s community has been exhilarating”.  He notes that this acceptance has been a longtime dream of his and is honored to be working closely with some of the world’s most savvy businesspeople. Petersen is excited to see the business grow in Utah and in many locations throughout the United States, adding “We believe we have an automated solution that will have a positive benefit for every business.”

While Lovage Labs is a Utah company, its foundations began in Taipei, Taiwan. There the four founders, Alexander Steffen, Robert Hinckley, Austin Petersen, and Boyd Christiansen, met each other while serving missions for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. In Taiwan they served in a unique capacity, developing social media marketing, CRM, and back-office tools for the church’s Asia missions. After their missions, having enjoyed working together, the founders reunited to start Lovage Labs.

The idea behind Lovage Labs came from the team seeing a distinct need for better business automation.  Recent labor shortages have impacted the ability of nearly all businesses to hire staff and maintain the quality of their brands. Hiring, training, and employee retention costs are at an all-time high for most businesses. In many instances highly skilled workers are pulled away from core business functions to complete repetitive tasks. For example, how many times have haircuts been interrupted because the stylist had to answer a phone call?  How many have experienced excruciatingly long wait times on hold just to get a simple question answered and then repeatedly yelled into the phone “representative”? Lovage Labs works to help reduce the cost of the labor and alleviates the over-tasking of a company’s workforce by designing an automated system so employees never have to answer the phone again. 

From handling support calls in a call center to replacing the receptionist at a salon the applications of Lovage Labs’ software are broad. But how does Lovage Labs’ software work? When a customer calls into a business a Lovage agent, a custom trained conversational AI, answers the call immediately and at any time of day. Lovage agents can handle any call volume, meaning that customers never have to wait to get help on the phone again. The Lovage agent then helps the customer just like an employee would. This includes answering questions, scheduling meetings or appointments, filtering spam calls, collecting payments, and more. The convenience that Lovage Labs provides has made it a favorite tool of businesses across the country.

More information about Lovage Labs, its software, and the founders can be found at their website getlovage.com and on their Y Combinator profile here. You can also learn more about Y Combinator here.