This past week, Vapi, a developer platform for deploying Voice AI agents, announced that it 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.
Founded in 2023 by Jordan Dearsley (CEO) and Nikhil Gupta (CTO), Vapi deploys flexible API and developer platforms, allowing customers to scale to handle millions of calls using voice agents in a couple of weeks.
Vapi said it 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.
“Consumer-facing companies run on voice,” Dearsley said. “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 has partnered with businesses across various industries—including finance, healthcare. Its customers include Mindtickle, Luma Health, Ellipsis Health, and Gestionadora de Créditos. Dearsley said that is only the beginning.
“Apple Intelligence and Google Gemini are poised to onboard four billion people to voice assistants that truly converse like humans,” Dearsley added. “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.”
“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.”