Crestail Makes Inaugural Investment, Leading Seed Round in Swell Internet

Crestail today announced it has led an undisclosed seed round in Swell Internet, an AI-native fiber internet service provider operated by a fleet of more than thirty production AI agents. The financing, Crestail's inaugural portfolio investment, closed on April 26, 2026.

Founded in 2025 by CEO Michael Berry and CTO Edi Yaffe and headquartered in New York, NY, Swell Internet is an AI-native, asset-light fiber internet service provider. The company partners with passive fiber operators for last-mile infrastructure and concentrates its own engineering on what it considers the durable advantage in modern telecom: the software and AI that operate the network and serve the customer.

The Crestail Thesis

Crestail invests at the intersection of next-generation telecommunications and artificial intelligence. The firm's core conviction is that the next decade of connectivity will not be won by whoever owns the most fiber. It will be won by whoever operates connectivity most intelligently. For nearly a century, telecom operators have been built around large, geographically distributed back offices: call centers, billing teams, network operations centers, dispatchers, retention desks. That cost structure has dictated everything about which markets get built, which customers get served, and how quickly. Generative AI changes that math for the first time.

Swell Internet is the canonical expression of that thesis. It is an asset-light fiber ISP whose operating organization is itself a software product (designed, version-controlled, and deployed like one) rather than a workforce.

An AI-Native Operator, Not an AI-Assisted One

Most companies that describe themselves as "AI-powered" use generative AI as a feature layered on top of a conventional operation. Swell is structured the other way around. The company's operating fabric is a virtual organization of more than thirty specialized AI agents, deployed in production across seven functional departments: customer experience, network operations, revenue operations, sales, marketing, field operations, and business intelligence. Lead agents in each department run on frontier reasoning models and coordinate work across specialist agents that handle higher-volume, lower-complexity tasks. Together, the fleet covers what would conventionally require a back-office team many times its size.

A few concrete examples of agents already running in production:

• CX Orchestrator: Routes live customer conversations to the right specialist agent (voice, chat, email, billing, technical, or retention) based on intent classification and model-confidence thresholds, escalating to a human only when confidence falls below a defined bar.

• Monitoring & Incident pair: Polls upstream network telemetry on a fixed cadence, detects faults at the OLT and customer-premises level, and autonomously triggers customer notifications, status-page updates, and field-dispatch workflows.

• Dunning agent: Runs durable, multi-step payment-recovery workflows across email, SMS, and voice channels, with state checkpointed in a workflow-orchestration runtime so that no customer is ever dropped from a recovery sequence even across deploys or outages.

• Content agent: Drafts and ships Swell's organic social presence (replies to fiber and ISP discussions on Reddit, X, and LinkedIn) with originality deduplication and brand-voice scoring before any post reaches a human reviewer.

The agents communicate through a real-time message bus and execute long-running workflows on top of a durable workflow-orchestration layer, so a conversation that begins with a customer-facing chat agent can hand off to a billing specialist, trigger an account adjustment, schedule a follow-up call, and return to the customer, all without a human in the loop and without losing state if any individual component fails.

"Most ISPs are network companies that bolted software on top. We're building Swell the other way around: a software-and-AI company that happens to deliver fiber. Crestail saw the same picture we did, that the next generation of connectivity will be operated and not just owned, and we're grateful to have them leading this round."

— Michael Berry, Co-Founder & CEO, Swell Internet

The Economic Argument

For decades, the fiber industry has been gated by a single metric, breakeven home density, which determines which markets a new operator can profitably enter. That metric is a function of capital cost and operating cost, and operating cost has historically meant staff. Crestail's investment thesis in Swell is straightforward: a fiber operator whose customer experience, network operations, and revenue operations are run by an agent fleet rather than a back office can profitably enter markets that traditional ISPs cannot. That, in turn, opens up the long tail of underserved American neighborhoods that have been waiting on fiber for a generation.

"Michael, Edi, and the Swell team are doing what the telecom industry has been waiting twenty years for: building an operator from the ground up around modern software and AI rather than around legacy infrastructure. Swell's economic model, a fiber ISP run by a virtual organization rather than a back office, is exactly the thesis Crestail was created to back, and there is no better company to mark our inaugural investment."

— Mark Berry, Partner, Crestail

Use of Proceeds

Swell Internet will deploy the seed capital to:

• Expand the agent fleet: Growing Swell's production fleet of AI agents across customer experience, network operations, revenue operations, sales, and field operations, deepening the autonomy of the virtual organization that runs the company day to day.

• Accelerate customer acquisition: Building brand and demand ahead of Swell's first fiber market launch so that day one of service feels like a long-awaited arrival, not a soft open.

• Light up the inaugural market: Launching Swell's first fiber market, the first city where customers will experience an AI-native ISP end to end.

About Swell Internet

Swell Internet, founded in 2025 by CEO Michael Berry and CTO Edi Yaffe and headquartered in New York, NY, is an AI-native, asset-light fiber internet service provider. The company operates through a virtual organization of more than thirty specialized AI agents, and is a Crestail portfolio company.

About Crestail

Crestail is an investment firm focused on next-generation telecommunications, artificial intelligence, and digital infrastructure, backed by a group of senior operators and investors from across the global telecommunications industry. Crestail partners with founders building the technologies that will define how the world connects. Learn more at crestail.com.

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