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.