Vapi Secures $20 Million in Series A Funding to Revolutionize Enterprise Voice AI

Vapi Raises USD 20 Million to Bring AI Voice Agents to Enterprises

Rapid adoption across industries like finance, healthcare, and travel. Vapi, a developer platform for Voice AI agents, has secured USD 20 million in Series A funding, led by Bessemer Venture Partners with support from Abstract Ventures, AI Grant, Y Combinator, Saga Ventures, and Michael Ovitz. The funding will help the company expand its engineering team, scale infrastructure, and serve new enterprise customers. Also Read: Tata Communications Launches Kaleyra AI Customer Interaction Solutions Suite Founded in 2023 by Jordan Dearsley (CEO) and Nikhil Gupta (CTO), Vapi enables businesses to deploy scalable, human-like voice agents quickly, with integrations for CRMs and EHRs, and existing telephony systems. "Vapi is building the infrastructure necessary to enable this voice-first future," the company said, noting that it has scaled revenue to millions - in six months since launch. With its API-first approach, the company has partnered with businesses across various industries -- including finance, healthcare, and travel. Vapi's customers include Mindtickle, Luma Health, Ellipsis Health, and Gestionadora de Creditos. The platform aims to support the growing demand for AI-powered voice solutions, as platforms like Apple Intelligence and Google Gemini push voice assistants to a global audience. "Over the past six months, generative voice models have begun to achieve human-level performance, in some cases even passing "the voice Turing test." This advancement, coupled with the accessibility of voice models on consumer mobile devices, has spurred growing interest among enterprises aiming to automate business-to-customer interactions," Vapi said in a statement on December 12. Also Read: SoundHound Brings Hindi Voice AI Experience to Kia Vehicles in India Jordan Dearsley, CEO of Vapi commented: "Consumer-facing companies run on voice. To scale their revenue, they need to scale their voice operations. But, people don't scale. You can try using an IVR (interactive-voice responses) system, but they sound robotic, and people just smash zero until they can talk to a person. With generative voice models, it's flexible like a human and it can scale to millions of calls." "Apple Intelligence and Google Gemini are poised to onboard 4 billion people to voice assistants that truly converse like humans. This marks a new beginning for voice as the world's default interface. Consumers will want voice agents everywhere, and enterprises need a platform to deploy them. This funding will allow us to scale our team and infrastructure to meet the growing demand for AI voice agents" added Jordan Dearsley. "Vapi provides a 10x improvement on the development experience for voice agents. Its elegant platform solves the hard engineering problems required to manage real-time voice infrastructure and build enterprise-grade voice agents, including the orchestration of third-party speech-to-text (STT) models, LLMs, and text-to-speech (TTS) models," Bessemer Venture Partners said. Mike Droesch, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, said, "Vapi is emerging as the leading developer platform for conversational voice agents, helping enterprises deploy agents that solve their unique business problems without having to worry about managing the underlying models and infrastructure." Also Read: Google Launches Gemini AI App for iPhone Users "Just as developer platforms helped power the meteoric rise of cloud software over the past decade, we are thrilled to be partnering with Vapi as they help to usher in the next wave of conversational AI applications," said Byron Deeter, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. "We believe that AI will fundamentally impact every vertical of the economy, with voice agents becoming a core interface for many of these applications."

Vapi secures $20M to advance AI voice agent platform and scale operations - SiliconANGLE

Vapi secures $20M to advance AI voice agent platform and scale operations Voice artificial intelligence startup Vapi (Superpowered Labs Inc.) announced today that it had raised $20 million in new funding to expand its engineering team, expand its infrastructure and reach new enterprise customers. Founded in 2023, Vapi offers a developer-first platform for deploying AI-powered voice agents. The company's platform gives developers access to flexible application programming interfaces that allow for the creation of custom conversational flows and the integration of voice AI into existing systems, including customer relationship management and electronic health records. Vapi's platform supports inbound and outbound call management and is ideal for applications such as customer support and sales outreach. The service includes a low-latency architecture that ensures real-time, natural conversations between users and AI agents to enhance customer interactions while reducing operational strain. The company's platform has been designed from the get-go to scale and is capable of managing millions of concurrent calls. It does so by leveraging a Kubernetes-based architecture and a private internet backbone to provide reliable, high-performance voice AI solutions for voice agents at scale without compromising quality or responsiveness. Through software development kits, Vapi can also be integrated with platforms such as iOS, Flutter, React Native and web applications, allowing enterprises to incorporate voice AI functionality across multiple channels. The company also offers function calling, which allows voice agents to perform tasks such as booking appointments or retrieving real-time data. While relatively young, Vapi has already experienced strong growth, generating millions in revenue within its first six months. Notable Vapi customers include Y Combinator, Deepgram Inc., Speaksage Inc., Luma Health Inc., and Playn Voice Inc. Bessemer Venture Partners LP led the Series A round, with Abstract Ventures, AI Grant Inc., Y Combinator, Saga Ventures and Michael Ovitz also participating. "Vapi is emerging as the leading developer platform for conversational voice agents, helping enterprises deploy agents that solve their unique business problems without having to worry about managing the underlying models and infrastructure," Mike Droesch, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, commented on why the firm chose to invest in Vapi. "We are impressed with their outstanding developer love, rapid growth and focus on building a world-class product. Although not officially disclosed, according to a "source familiar with the matter" referenced by Reuters, the round was raised on a valuation of $130 million.

Voice AI startup Vapi raises $20 mln in Bessemer, Y Combinator-backed round

Dec 12 (Reuters) - Vapi, a San Francisco-based startup that helps businesses deploy artificial intelligence-powered voice agents, said on Thursday it raised $20 million from investors, including Bessemer Venture Partners and Y Combinator, in an early-stage funding round. The fundraise valued Vapi at $130 million, according to a source familiar with the matter. Other investors in the round included Abstract Ventures, AI Grant, Saga Ventures and Michael Ovitz, who co-founded the influential Creative Artists Agency. Businesses looking for faster and cheaper resolution to customer queries are increasingly adopting AI voice agents, driving up interest in startups developing the technology. "AI will fundamentally impact every vertical of the economy, with voice agents becoming a core interface for many of these applications," said Mike Droesch, partner at Bessemer Venture, which has invested in companies such as Pinterest and Shopify. Barclays estimated last month that the AI agent market could be as big as $110 billion by 2028, as firms ranging from tech giants Microsoft to startups such as OpenAI race to roll out the technology. Vapi said the latest funds would be used to scale its engineering team and infrastructure to meet growing demand. The company, founded in 2023, operates a platform designed for developers to build, test and deploy voice AI agents quickly and efficiently. It expects to hit $8 million in revenue by the end of the year. Reporting by Kritika Lamba in Bengaluru; Editing by Shreya Biswas Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab Suggested Topics:Technology