San Francisco, Dec. 12, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — 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. However, deploying and scaling voice agents can require months, if not years, of specialized engineering.
Helping enterprises over this challenge, Vapi, a leading developer platform for deploying Voice AI agents, announced today that it has raised $20 million in Series A funding, led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from Abstract Ventures, AI Grant, Y Combinator, Saga Ventures, and Michael Ovitz. This investment will enable the company to expand its engineering team, scale its infrastructure, and reach new enterprise customers.
The Vapi team: helping engineering teams deploy voice agents in their products and services
Founded in 2023 by Jordan Dearsley (CEO) and Nikhil Gupta (CTO), Vapi is on a mission to “bend the arc of technology back to the human voice,” Vapi is building the infrastructure necessary to enable this voice-first future. Through its flexible API and developer platform, customers can scale to handle millions of calls using voice agents in a couple of weeks.
Recognizing that every business has its own unique workflows and integrations, Vapi takes a developer-first approach. It provides APIs for engineering teams to design custom conversation flows, integrate their CRMs and EHRs, and incorporate Vapi’s voice agents into existing enterprise telephony systems.
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.”
Vapi founders: Jordan Dearsley (CEO) and Nikhil Gupta (CTO).
Since its launch, Vapi has experienced remarkable growth, scaling to millions in revenue within its first six months. The company has partnered with businesses across various industries—including finance, healthcare, and travel—demonstrating the versatility and effectiveness of its voice AI technology. A few of Vapi’s customers include Mindtickle, Luma Health, Ellipsis Health, and Gestionadora de Créditos.
“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.
“We chose Vapi to power our Voice AI strategy because of its mature platform and outstanding capabilities. It enables seamless integration, helping us deliver solutions to our customers in record time. Vapi is far ahead of any other platform—simple, powerful, and it just works.” Said Marcelo Oliveira, SVP of Engineering at Luma Health
“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,” said Mike Droesch, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. “We are impressed with their outstanding developer love, rapid growth, and focus on building a world-class product. We look forward to helping them continue to redefine how people interact with technology.”
“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.”
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About Vapi
Vapi.ai is a leading platform for deploying AI voice agents. With a developer-first approach, Vapi lets engineering teams deploy voice agents in their products and services. For more information, visit https://vapi.ai/
About Bessemer Venture Partners
Bessemer Venture Partners helps entrepreneurs lay strong foundations to build and forge long-standing companies. With more than 145 IPOs and 300 portfolio companies in the enterprise, consumer and healthcare spaces, Bessemer supports founders and CEOs from their early days through every stage of growth. Bessemer’s global portfolio has included Pinterest, Shopify, Twilio, Yelp, LinkedIn, PagerDuty, DocuSign, Wix, Fiverr, and Toast and has more than $18 billion of assets under management. Bessemer has teams of investors and partners located in Tel Aviv, Silicon Valley, San Francisco, New York, London, Hong Kong, Boston, and Bangalore. Born from innovations in steel more than a century ago, Bessemer’s storied history has afforded its partners the opportunity to celebrate and scrutinize its best investment decisions (see Memos) and also learn from its mistakes (see Anti-Portfolio).
