Vapi secures USD $20 million for AI voice agent expansion

Voice AI developer platform Vapi has announced a successful Series A funding round of USD $20 million, led by Bessemer Venture Partners.

Based in San Francisco, Vapi has experienced rapid growth since its founding in 2023. In only six months, the company has generated millions in revenue, deploying voice agents across a variety of industries such as customer service and healthcare. The fresh capital injection will help the firm to expand its engineering team and scale its infrastructure to accommodate new enterprise clients.

The funding round also saw participation from Abstract Ventures, AI Grant, Y Combinator, Saga Ventures, and Michael Ovitz. The move comes at a time when generative voice models have begun achieving human-like performance, significantly transforming the landscape of business-to-customer interactions. Despite this advancement, deploying and scaling voice agents remains a challenging endeavour for many enterprises.

Jordan Dearsley, CEO of Vapi, explained the company's mission: "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 aims to simplify the deployment of voice agents through its developer-first approach, offering APIs that allow customisation of conversation flows and integration with existing enterprise systems, including CRMs and EHRs. These capabilities have appealed to several organisations such as Mindtickle, Luma Health, Ellipsis Health, and Gestionadora de Créditos.

The potential impact of voice AI technology is far-reaching, as elaborated by Dearsley. "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," he added.

Marcelo Oliveira, SVP of Engineering at Luma Health, shared his experience with Vapi, saying, "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."

Bessemer Venture Partners, who led the funding round, expressed their confidence in Vapi. Mike Droesch, a partner at the firm, remarked, "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. 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."

Byron Deeter, another partner at Bessemer, added, "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."

"We believe that AI will fundamentally impact every vertical of the economy, with voice agents becoming a core interface for many of these applications."