Aura handles the wrong fit leads. Humans close the right ones.

The company rebuilding driving schools in Italy

Founded in 2024 in Milan and part of OneDay Group (the same group behind WeRoad and ScuolaZoo), BRUM is doing for Italian driving schools what Klarna did for payments and Revolut did for banking. They are tearing out the bureaucracy, replacing it with an app, and growing fast.

The numbers tell the story:

• 7 cities and counting, opening one new school every month for the next three years
• 117,000+ app downloads in the last six months
• 450,000+ practice quizzes completed
• Team doubled in the last year
• €9M+ raised across three rounds, latest led by Italian Founders Fund
• Featured in Forbes, Il Sole 24 Ore, La Repubblica
• 4.8 App Store rating, 4.7 Trustpilot

Their customers are Gen Z and young Millennials. The channel they live on is WhatsApp. The expectation: instant.

When you're scaling fast, every wasted sales call is a tax

BRUM doesn't just sell driving licenses to students. They also recruit driving instructors, license franchise locations, and onboard new "city managers" as they expand. That means a huge volume of inbound leads, and most of them aren't in target.

When BRUM runs a paid campaign to recruit instructors, hundreds of people inquire. Most don't qualify. In the old setup, running on Intercom, every one of those conversations landed on a human in the sales team, who'd burn time qualifying out wrong fit candidates.

"You'd waste tons of time on the phone or in messages just gathering all the basics, and in the end it wasn't even a valid contact. It was a tax on the team."

Rebecca Maroni Customer Success at BRUM

For a scale up opening a new school every month, that tax was structural. Either they hired their way out of it, or they automated.

They automated.

In November 2025, BRUM activated Aura

BRUM moved from Intercom to Customerly and configured Aura as the first responder for every inbound WhatsApp and web chat. The setup was led by Sofia Di Cesare, who'd come in from Intercom and could compare both tools side by side.

"The setup of Customerly is just foolproof. It's genuinely easy to set up any kind of flow, and the inputs are conversational. You don't need to touch code or do anything weird. You just tell it 'use this property' and it does it. That's huge."

Sofia Di Cesare Marketing Operations at BRUM

The real configuration win wasn't just enabling AI. It was the use of AI Missions for lead qualification.

Aura now handles the entire top of funnel for two specific flows:

• "I want to become an instructor": Aura explains the requirements, the BRUM Academy path, and the next steps. If the lead is in target (right city, right qualifications), she routes to a human. If not, she politely closes the loop herself: "Mi spiace, ma ci serve che tu abbia queste caratteristiche."
• "I want to open a BRUM driving school": same logic for franchise inquiries.

The result: the human team never sees the wrong fit leads.

The day the campaign hit

"There was one day when we had something like 30 chats just on instructor recruitment because the ads team had pushed hard on that campaign. Aura handled all of them automatically. The sales team didn't have to touch a single one of the wrong ones."

Rebecca Maroni Customer Success at BRUM

Why Customerly won over Intercom

Sofia had built customer service workflows on Intercom before joining BRUM. Her sharpest take on what made Customerly different was a feature most buyers don't think to look for: explainability.

"The absolute advantage of Customerly, especially on the AI agent side, is that when you analyze Aura's conversations you can see exactly why she gave that answer. Which flow was triggered, which knowledge base article was used. Most tools don't give you that. With Intercom or HubSpot you have to fumble around trying to figure out where the response came from. Here, every single answer shows you the source."

Sofia Di Cesare Marketing Operations at BRUM

That visibility is what makes Aura tunable in practice, not just in theory. When a response goes off, the team knows immediately whether the knowledge base needs an update or a flow needs a tweak. No fumbling, no guessing which black box produced which sentence.

What changed after Aura

Conversion data covers Aura's qualification flow at BRUM between 6 October 2025 and 6 April 2026. Other supporting numbers come from BRUM's public reports.

Speed where it matters most

Human first reply time on BRUM's team averages around 3 hours, appropriate for the complex, case by case nature of driving school operations (every booking, document, exam status is personal). But that first 26 second acknowledgment from Aura is what stops customers from drifting away. As Rebecca puts it:

"When hours go by without a reply, customers start writing 'is anyone there?' Having that instant response matters a lot."

Rebecca Maroni Customer Success at BRUM

Lead qualification that actually converts

Between 6 October 2025 and 6 April 2026, Aura's qualification flow handled 254 conversations. Of those, 47 converted into paying customers after handoff to the sales team. That's an 18.5% conversion rate from inbound chat to closed booking.

Aura's role in this flow is qualification: she asks the right questions, filters out wrong fit leads, and routes only the in target ones to humans. Sales closes from there. The split is deliberate, and the numbers prove it works.

"Honestly, it wasn't an expected result. Minimum spend, maximum return."

Rebecca Maroni Customer Success at BRUM

Sofia, who watched the conversion rate develop from the setup side, sees the upside as bigger than today's number suggests:

"At the moment there's still some resistance to buying directly without talking to a real person. People want to be called, to make sure we're not a scam. But I can imagine a year from now: Aura sends the checkout link, the person buys, and no human voice ever enters the loop. The possibilities are huge."

Sofia Di Cesare Marketing Operations at BRUM

What BRUM does with the time

When asked what changes about her day thanks to Aura, Rebecca focused on what she calls the value problem:

"Aura is the reason we can spend our energy on things that actually matter."

Rebecca Maroni Customer Success at BRUM

Sofia echoes the same thesis from the setup and strategy seat:

"Aura is the reason we can focus on the things that produce value. Stop dealing with everything that doesn't add anything, and really focus on making the experience better for the person."

Sofia Di Cesare Marketing Operations at BRUM

Translated into operations: as BRUM scales from 7 cities to 36 over the next three years, the support team is building tag based routing so conversations auto route by city, by stage of the customer journey, by exam status. Aura handles first contact across the entire network. Humans handle anything that requires real human judgment.

The unexpected product win: Companion

One thing the BRUM team didn't sign up for but ended up using daily: Customerly's Companion, an AI assistant for agents (not for customers). When Rebecca needed to perform an unfamiliar task, like building a contact list, she could ask Companion directly and get walked through step by step.

"Instead of bothering Sofie or you guys, I figured I'd just ask Companion. It walked me through it perfectly."

Rebecca Maroni Customer Success at BRUM

This is the kind of feature that doesn't show up in a sales deck but becomes invisible glue. For a fast growing team where roles are evolving weekly, it matters.

Why this matters for other scale ups

BRUM's setup is the blueprint for any consumer scale up that:

• Runs paid acquisition at scale (and therefore generates floods of low fit leads)
• Operates on WhatsApp or chat first channels (where customers expect instant)
• Sells something that requires human closing (not pure self serve)
• Is expanding geographically or operationally faster than they can hire

Most AI customer service tools assume you want full autonomy. AI replaces humans. BRUM proves a different model: AI as the qualifier, the responder, the organizer. Humans as the closers, the decision makers, the relationship builders.

It's a partnership, not a replacement. And it scales.