Vapi, a developer platform for deploying Voice AI agents, has raised $20 million in Series A funding. The investment round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners (which recently invested in ANYbotics and Upvest), 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.
What challenge does it resolve?
In recent 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 specialised engineering. Vapi helps enterprises overcome this challenge by deploying Voice AI agents.
“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.”
Brings AI voice agents to enterprises
Vapi was founded in 2023 by Jordan Dearsley and Nikhil Gupta with the mission to bring the power of the human voice back to technology. It builds the infrastructure necessary to enable this voice-first future via its flexible API and developer platform. Customers can scale to handle millions of calls using voice agents in a couple of weeks.
Recognising that every business has its 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.
Since its debut, 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. Some notable customers of Vapi include Mindtickle, Luma Health, Ellipsis Health, and Gestionadora de Créditos.
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.”
“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.
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