# Lily Clifford

> Lily Clifford is the CEO and co-founder of Rime, a San Francisco-based voice AI company building enterprise-grade text-to-speech models with a linguistic edge. A Stanford NLP PhD dropout with a background in sociophonetics, she left academia in 2023 to prove that AI voices could sound like a friend rather than a voice actor. Rime now powers over 100 million phone conversations monthly for brands like Domino's and Wingstop, having raised $8.6M in total funding. Her counterintuitive thesis - that slightly 'bored' voices outperform perfectly polished ones - has become the foundation of a fast-growing enterprise voice platform.

- **Role:** CEO and Founder at Rime
- **Organizations:** Rime (Rime Labs Inc.)
- **Nationality:** American
- **Education:** BA, Linguistics, Pitzer College, PhD (ABD), Computational Linguistics / Natural Language Processing, Stanford University
- **Known for:** Built Rime into a platform powering 100+ million phone conversations monthly, Raised $8.6M total funding including $5.5M seed led by Unusual Ventures (May 2025), Assembled what the company claims is the world's largest proprietary conversational speech dataset

## Career timeline

- **2014** — Graduated from Pitzer College with a BA in Linguistics
- **2018** — Enrolled in Stanford University's PhD program in Computational Linguistics
- **2018-2023** — Researched sociophonetics and computational linguistics at Stanford; studied how social and demographic factors shape speech patterns
- **2022** — Co-founded Rime (Rime Labs Inc.) with Brooke Larson and Ares Geovanos; left Stanford PhD program to pursue the company full-time
- **2022-2023** — Built an in-house recording studio in San Francisco; assembled proprietary conversational speech dataset including laughter, interruptions, and natural disfluencies
- **2023** — Launched Rime's Mist TTS model family; secured early enterprise customers
- **2024** — Scaled to tens of millions of monthly phone conversations; launched Arcana expressive AI model and Mist v2
- **2025-05** — Announced $5.5M seed funding round led by Unusual Ventures, bringing total funding to $8.6M; company now powers 100M+ monthly conversations for 20+ enterprise clients including Domino's and Wingstop

## Achievements

- Built Rime into a platform powering 100+ million phone conversations monthly
- Raised $8.6M total funding including $5.5M seed led by Unusual Ventures (May 2025)
- Assembled what the company claims is the world's largest proprietary conversational speech dataset
- Achieved SOC 2 Type II certification and HIPAA compliance
- First next-gen voice AI model available for on-premises deployment
- Customers include Domino's, Wingstop, and major healthcare and telecom enterprises
- Delivered sub-200ms latency for real-time voice synthesis at enterprise scale
- Launched 200+ distinct voices across demographic and linguistic profiles

## Latest updates

- **2025-05** — Announced $5.5M seed round led by Unusual Ventures, bringing total funding to $8.6M
- **2025-05** — Rime now powers 100M+ monthly phone conversations across restaurant ordering, healthcare, and telecom
- **2025-01** — Hosted Contact Center AI Association event in San Francisco focused on the future of enterprise voice AI
- **2024-05** — Launched Arcana expressive voice AI model and Mist v2, fastest customizable TTS
- **2024-03** — Introduced Mist TTS model family for real-time voice applications

## Links

- Website: https://rime.ai
- LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/lily-clifford-b25b83208
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/lilyjclifford

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/lily-clifford
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-05-06