AI

Vapi voice AI startup receives $20M to develop voice agent technology

Vapi, a voice AI startup, has received more than $20 million in Series A funding.

Image: Vapi

December 17, 2024

Vapi, a voice AI startup, has received more than $20 million in Series A funding, according to a press release.

The round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participants including Abstract Ventures, AI Grant, Y Combinator, Saga Ventures and Michael Ovitz.

Vapi was founded by CEO Jordan Dearsley and CTO Nikhil Gupta in 2023; the firm takes a developer-first approach and provides APIs to enable customers to leverage Vapi voice technology in a company's unique workflow and tech stack, including CRM and EHR integration.

"Consumer-facing companies run on voice," Dearsley said in the release. "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," Marcelo Oliveira, SVP of engineering at Luma Health, said in the release. "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."