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Cresta Wants Every Agent to Sound Like Your Best One
Born in Stanford's AI lab and now worth $1.6 billion, Cresta listens to every call in a contact center and coaches humans in real time - while quietly building the AI agents meant to replace some of those calls entirely.
The AI Agents Racing to Answer Your Support Calls
Infobip, PolyAI, Cresta, Botpress and a pack of rivals are pouring hundreds of millions into software that picks up the phone before a person can. Here is who is winning, who got bought, and what it means the next time you dial support.
The Quiet Redesign of Customer Service
Customer service is being rebuilt in the background, one conversation at a time. A wave of companies - Cognigy, Parloa, Cresta, UJET, Amazon Connect, Cisco's Webex Contact Center, 8x8 and Vonage - are turning the contact center from a cost you apologize for into software that answers the phone. This is the story of the quiet redesign: who is building it, what changed in 2025 and 2026, and why the hold music is finally getting shorter.
Tim Shi
Tim Shi is the co-founder and former CTO of Cresta, the AI platform for contact centers that grew to over $100M ARR and raised $401M from Sequoia, a16z, and Greylock. A Tsinghua CS graduate who did early AI research at OpenAI alongside Andrej Karpathy — including the 'World of Bits' paper on web-based reinforcement learning agents — he co-founded Cresta in 2017 with Zayd Enam after both dropped out of Stanford's AI PhD program. In 2025, he co-founded Recursive Superintelligence, which emerged from stealth with $650M at a $4.65B valuation to build self-improving AI systems.
Ping Wu
Ping Wu is the CEO of Cresta, a Sunnyvale-based AI company transforming contact centers with generative AI. Before leading Cresta, Wu spent 14 years at Google where he co-founded the Contact Center AI (CCAI) Solution and Vertex AI platform. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from UC Santa Barbara and a BS from Fudan University. Under his leadership, Cresta raised a $125M Series D in November 2024 and quadrupled its ARR, serving enterprise clients like United Airlines and Cox Communications.
Andre Esteva
Andre Esteva, PhD, is the co-founder and CEO of ArteraAI, a medical AI company whose test for personalizing prostate cancer therapy is included in NCCN clinical guidelines, reimbursed by Medicare, and deployed internationally. A Stanford-trained AI scientist whose Nature cover paper first demonstrated that AI could match dermatologists at diagnosing skin cancer, Esteva has co-founded four companies with a combined market cap of $2.2B. Named to TIME100 Health 2025 and Modern Healthcare's 40 Under 40 for 2025, he leads a company that raised $175M total and was named a TIME 2024 Best Invention.