Big Talk: How Vapi Plans To Solve Customer Service With Voice AI

Vapi founders Jordan Dearsley and Nikhil Gupta

For many consumer-facing companies, generative voice technology could be utterly transformative. If artificial intelligence can produce voice assistants capable of answering customers’ questions and solving their problems, they can transform customer service, finally putting an end to the delays and mis-steps that cause consumers so much frustration when dealing with call centres.

San Francisco-based start-up Vapi, which is today announcing a $20 million Series A round, is one of a small handful of companies that claims to have cracked this challenge. While automated call centres and interactive voice response tools currently seem to cause as many issues as they resolve, Vapi says its technology makes it possible to provide AI-powered voice agents who are pretty much indistinguishable from human call centre operatives.

“Often, people don’t even realise they’re talking to an AI agent when they interact with our technology,” says Jordan Dearsley, who launched Vapi with co-founder Nikhil Gupta in March. “And even if they do, they’re happy with the way that the agent resolves their query.”

Vapi has built a developer platform that companies can use to develop voice agents customised for their specific needs; sometimes Vapi works directly with consumer-facing businesses introducing the technology while in other cases its platform is used by telephony and call centre specialists who want to build voice agents into the services they offer.

The business model is based on Vapi’s view that since no two companies are the same, simply providing standardised voice agents isn’t going to work. Rather, Vapi argues, its customers need to incorporate the technology into their own systems, alongside customer relationship management software and other tools.

Dearsley believes that companies that get this right will secure genuine competitive advantage. “Consumer-facing companies run on voice so to scale their revenues, they need to scale their voice operations,” he says. “It’s really difficult to scale people, but with generative voice models, you can scale to millions of calls.”

Vapi’s CEO also believes the company is taking off at just the right moment, with the big tech giants on the verge of launching new voice-enabled services that will normalise the idea of interacting with technology through speech. “Apple Intelligence and Google Gemini are poised to onboard 4 billion people to voice assistants that truly converse like humans,” he argues. “This marks a new beginning for voice as the world’s default interface – consumers will want voice agents everywhere.”

Whether he’s right remains to be seen – and, critically, will depend on whether AI-powered voice agents really can deliver what consumers want quickly and sensibly. However, early adopters of Vapi’s technology have been impressed. Luma Health, for example, builds customer services platforms for healthcare customers and patients, and now uses Vapi’s technology. “We chose Vapi to power our Voice AI strategy because of its mature platform and outstanding capabilities,” says Marcelo Oliveira, senior vice president of engineering at the company. “It enables seamless integration, helping us deliver solutions to our customers in record time.”

The technology is evolving rapidly, with competitors to Vapi such as Bland AI and Retell AI also innovating to improve voice agents. The additional financial firepower that today’s fundraising will give Vapi is therefore vital, enabling the business to invest in engineering capacity. Dearsley is keen to invest in the platform’s resilience, ensuring its technology is capable of handling much larger call volumes, and to improve its model determinism – essentially to ensure the AI does not produce hallucinations.

The $20 million round is led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from Abstract Ventures, AI Grant, Y Combinator, Saga Ventures and the businessman and investor Michael Ovitz.

“Vapi is emerging as the leading developer platform for conversational voice agents,” says Mike Droesch, a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. “It is helping enterprises deploy agents that solve their unique business problems without having to worry about managing the underlying models and infrastructure.”

Today’s funding brings the total amount of money raised by the company to $23 million and values Vapi at around $130 million.