Silicon Valley is full of comfortable offices with gleaming meeting rooms and on-site baristas. So when early HappyRobot engineer Ari Polakof decided to strike out and start his own company, he didn’t exactly expect to wind up tapping on his laptop in a service bay alongside mechanics.

“Very noisy, impossible to concentrate,” he laughed.

But that’s part of the story of how Polakof’s new AI-for-car-dealerships startup Flai got off the ground last year.

Founded by Polakof and his brother Alen (also from HappyRobot) at Y Combinator, along with former Netflix data scientist Juan Alzugary, Flai is one of a number of startups trying to use artificial intelligence to improve the experience of buying, selling, or servicing a car at a dealership.

The co-founders have built software from the g

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