Vapi Raises $20M to Serve Explosive Demand for Voice AI

Towards the Voice-First Future

For most of human history, we’ve shaped our world through conversation. But for decades, as  shifted, we adapted ourselves to machines—typing, clicking, and swiping. Now, technology is adapting back. Voice AI has reached a point where its outputs can be as natural as a human conversation.

In just the last six months, voice AI has moved from clunky and robotic to conversationally fluent. Most people can’t distinguish between AI-generated speech and a human voice anymore, and before long, these systems won’t just match human ability, they’ll exceed it.

At Vapi, we believe in that voice-first future. Voice is the most natural form of human expression, and we want to use it to put humans back at the foreground of technology. We want a world where our ideas and goals can manifest in the real world seamlessly, without pushing pixels and clacking keyboards. In the past we have been constrained by technology; now it should bend to us.

Read the full story as covered by Reuters, Forbes, Business Insider, and The Economic Times.

Where We Are

Consumer-facing companies that rely on voice interactions are at a turning point. They need to handle more calls than human teams can manage, and legacy IVR systems feel painfully artificial. New generative voice models can solve this problem at scale. They can speak any language, adapt instantly, and run millions of concurrent conversations with no downtime.

Beyond consumer calls, a second wave is rising. We envision a world where:

• Small businesses never miss a critical call.
• Patients get the immediate care they deserve.
• Anyone can call up a personal AI tutor, any time, in any language.

What We Need

We are creating the platform on which this future will be built. We offer:

• Complete control over models, integrations, and workflows.
• Deterministic conversation flows to guarantee agent behavior.
• Scalable, robust infrastructure designed for Enterprise.
• Simple integration with existing telephony systems.

Think of us in the tradition of infrastructure and platform companies that take over the most complex, unrewarding parts of an engineering problem – the schlep – so that enterprises and developers can focus on what they do best. This is what AWS did for the initial cloud transition, what Datadog did for cloud monitoring, and what Twilio did for SMS and phone calls. We aren’t the flashy part – we make the engine that powers the magic. It's the secret sauce that will bring this revolutionary technology to the world.

Join Us

We’re grateful for the fellow believers betting on a voice-first future:

• Over 100,000 developers are building on our platform.
• We’re handling millions of calls per month for customers worldwide.
• We are tackling the hard problems of real-time agentic reasoning head-on.
• We’ve assembled an extraordinary team; ex-YC CTOs, founders, high-energy weirdos.
• We’ve raised $20M in Series A funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with support from Abstract Ventures, AI Grant, Y Combinator, Saga Ventures, and Michael Ovitz.

The shift to voice-first interaction is underway. We’re proud to be building the infrastructure that will power the next era of human-machine communication.

We’re building the Vapi Mafia in SF. Join us.