Tagged: voice-ai
30 results
ELSA, Corp
ELSA (English Language Speech Assistant) is an AI-powered English pronunciation and speaking coach built on proprietary speech-recognition technology trained on non-native accents. Founded in 2015 by Vu Van and speech scientist Xavier Anguera, the app gives learners real-time, phoneme-level feedback on how they actually sound - not just what they type. It has grown to tens of millions of users across 100+ countries and expanded from a consumer app into ELSA Business, ELSA Schools, an API, and a generative-AI conversation tool called ELSA AI Tutor.
The CEO who spent $500,000 on a first name
Aaron Wang is the co-founder and CEO of Alex (alex.com), the AI recruiter that runs autonomous phone screens and video interviews at scale. He started the company as Apriora in 2023 with John Rytel, then paid more than half a million dollars for the alex.com domain and renamed both the product and the company after its AI agent. A Brown University graduate in computer science, applied math, and economics, Wang previously worked at Facebook AI Research and as a quantitative analyst at a hedge fund. Alex conducts thousands of interviews a day for Fortune 100 firms, banks, restaurant chains, and Big 4 accounting firms, and has raised roughly $20 million, including a $17 million Series A led by Peak XV Partners.
Paul Singer
Paul Singer is the cofounder and CEO of FleetWorks, a San Francisco startup building always-on voice AI agents that handle the phone-and-email grind of freight brokerage. A former Uber Freight product manager and Yale economics grad, he started FleetWorks in late 2022 with cofounder Quang Tran, went through Y Combinator's Summer 2023 batch, and in October 2025 raised a $17M round (including a $15M Series A led by First Round Capital) to automate the matching of trucks with cargo across a $1T+ industry.
Daily
Daily is a San Francisco developer platform for real-time voice, video, and AI. Founded in 2016 by Kwindla Hultman Kramer and Nina Kuruvilla, the company runs a global WebRTC mesh that powers video calling for products like Pitch, AppFolio, Kumospace, and HotDoc, and it created Pipecat - the open-source orchestration framework now used as the backbone for production voice agents at companies like NVIDIA, Cresta, and Epic.
Deepgram
Deepgram builds foundational voice AI - speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and full voice-agent APIs - used by more than 1,300 enterprises including NASA, Spotify, Twilio and Citibank to give machines the ability to listen, understand, and respond in real time.
Krisp
Krisp is a voice AI company that strips background noise, voices, and echo from live calls using deep learning, then layers transcription, meeting notes, accent conversion, and real-time translation on top. Founded in 2017 by ex-Twilio engineers, it now processes 75+ billion minutes of audio a month for contact centers, BPOs, Discord, and millions of remote workers.
Numa
Numa is the leading AI platform for automotive dealerships, powering customer operations across 1,300+ rooftops in the U.S. and Canada. Founded by the team behind Location Labs (acquired by AVG for $220M), Numa's AI agents handle calls, texts, appointments, and customer satisfaction monitoring - reducing response times from 24 hours to 20 minutes and driving measurable increases in dealership profitability and CSI scores.
Alexey Aylarov
Alexey Aylarov is the CEO and co-founder of Voximplant, a Voice AI orchestration and cloud communications platform (CPaaS) powering 30,000+ customers and 2+ billion calls annually. A VoIP engineer turned serial entrepreneur, he spent 20+ years in telecommunications before building Voximplant into an enterprise-grade platform combining serverless infrastructure with AI-driven voice and video communications. Based in Sunnyvale, California, he co-founded the company in 2013 alongside Sergey Poroshin and Andrey Kovalenko, guiding it to profitability in under two years and through a $30M Series C raise in 2021.
Anand Prajapati
Anand Prajapati is Co-Founder and CTO of Leena AI, an enterprise agentic AI platform that deploys AI colleagues to automate back-office work across HR, IT, Finance, and Procurement. A graduate of IIT Delhi, Anand built Leena AI's technology from scratch after two earlier startup pivots, guiding the company through Y Combinator's Summer 2018 batch to a $30M Series B led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Today Leena AI's platform serves 400+ enterprise customers across 90+ countries - including Nestlé, Coca-Cola, and Sony - resolving millions of employee queries autonomously across 100+ languages.
Andy Ruff
Andy Ruff is the co-founder and Chief Product & Tech officer at Numa, an AI communication platform purpose-built for automotive dealerships. A lifelong product builder who started writing software at 13, Ruff led the 100-person team that created the first Microsoft Outlook for Mac client, then scaled Location Labs to over 3 million monthly subscribers before its $220M acquisition. At Numa, he is building the AI stack that converts missed dealership calls into revenue - helping the $1.2 trillion retail automotive sector catch up to the digital age.
Gadi Shamia
Gadi Shamia is the CEO and co-founder of Replicant, a voice AI platform that automates customer service calls at enterprise scale. A serial entrepreneur who sold his first company (TopManage) to SAP, helped EchoSign sell to Adobe for $400M, and scaled Talkdesk from seed to unicorn as COO, he brings two decades of building and scaling B2B software companies to the challenge of replacing traditional IVR systems with natural-sounding, AI-driven conversations. Under his leadership, Replicant has automated over 1 billion minutes of customer interactions and raised $113M in funding.
Jordan Dearsley
Jordan Dearsley is the co-founder and CEO of Vapi, the leading voice AI infrastructure platform trusted by over one million developers and powering more than one billion calls. A University of Waterloo software engineering dropout turned Y Combinator alumnus, Dearsley built Vapi out of a personal AI therapist he created for his morning walks in 2023. Under his leadership, Vapi reached a $500 million valuation in May 2026 after raising a $50M Series B led by Peak XV, with customers including Amazon Ring, Intuit, and New York Life.
Kwindla Hultman Kramer
Kwindla Hultman Kramer is co-founder and CEO of Daily.co, a developer platform providing real-time voice, video, and AI infrastructure. He is also the creator of Pipecat, the most widely used open-source framework for building voice AI agents. A Harvard and MIT Media Lab alumnus, Kwindla has spent his career at the intersection of real-time communication and developer infrastructure—from scaling AllAfrica.com as CTO to building spatial computing interfaces at Oblong Industries to raising $62M+ for Daily and releasing Pipecat to the open-source community.
Luis Paarup
Luis Paarup is the Co-Founder and CTO of HappyRobot, the AI voice agent platform transforming how logistics enterprises automate operations. A robotics engineer by training with a Masters from the Technical University of Munich, Luis met his co-founder Pablo Palafox on a competitive underwater robotics team and went on to build one of the fastest-growing AI companies in the supply chain space. HappyRobot, a Y Combinator S23 company backed by a16z and Base10 Partners, has raised over $100M and deployed AI workers at 70+ enterprise customers including DHL, Ryder, and U.S. Xpress.
Marty Sarim
Marty Massih Sarim is the President of Sanas, a real-time speech AI platform that modulates accents and eliminates background noise for contact center agents globally. An Afghan refugee who came to the US in the early 1980s and started his career at 18 as a call center agent, Sarim brings over 25 years of BPO and contact center industry expertise to Sanas. He is also Co-Founder and General Partner at Carya Venture Partners, a $20M micro-fund focused on deep tech and enterprise AI, and founder of the Moe123 Scholarship Fund, which has awarded $125,000+ to high school seniors in the Minneapolis area.
Masa Shimizu
Masahiro 'Masa' Shimizu is the Founder & CEO of ZEALS Co., Ltd. and Omakase.ai, the Japanese pioneer of Chat Commerce. He started ZEALS as a Meiji University freshman in 2014 with robots and a mission to 'elevate Japan,' pivoted to chatbots within one month of Facebook opening its Messenger API in 2016, built Japan's #1 social chat commerce platform with 300+ employees and $69M+ raised, and is now taking that same hospitality-first philosophy — what he calls 'Omotenashi' — into voice-powered AI agents for global e-commerce through Omakase.ai.
Nina Kuruvilla
Nina Kuruvilla is co-founder of Daily.co, a San Francisco-based enterprise WebRTC platform that powers real-time voice and video for thousands of developers and enterprises. After co-founding Daily in 2016 through Y Combinator, she guided the company through 30x revenue growth during the pandemic and championed the open-sourcing of Pipecat - a vendor-neutral Python framework for building real-time voice and multimodal AI agents now used by NVIDIA, AWS, and thousands of startups worldwide. Her strategic bet: the infrastructure built for human-to-human video calls turns out to be exactly what voice AI agents need.
Pablo Palafox
Pablo Palafox is the Co-Founder and CEO of HappyRobot, a San Francisco-based AI workforce platform that deploys autonomous voice agents for logistics and freight operations. A Spanish-born roboticist who left a PhD program at the Technical University of Munich in 2022, he has built HappyRobot from a YC S23 startup into a company serving 70+ enterprise clients including DHL, Ryder, Schneider, and Werner - raising $103M across three funding rounds, most recently a $44M Series B led by Base10 Partners with participation from Andreessen Horowitz.
Punit Soni
Punit Singh Soni is the founder and CEO of Suki, the ambient clinical intelligence platform that lets doctors spend more time with patients and less time typing into electronic health records. A product veteran who helped ship the Moto X and rebuild Flipkart's consumer experience, Soni founded Suki in 2017 on a single thesis - 'AI is the new UI' - before that phrase became a conference staple. Suki now serves 350+ health systems across the US, has raised $255 million in total funding, and helps clinicians complete notes 72% faster. Soni was educated at NIT Kurukshetra, the University of Wyoming, and Wharton, and has lived at the intersection of big tech, emerging markets, and healthcare for over two decades.
Raghu Ravinutala
Raghu Ravinutala is the co-founder and CEO of Yellow.ai, an enterprise-grade conversational AI platform that automates customer and employee experiences at scale. A former IC design engineer turned AI entrepreneur, he built Yellow.ai into a $500M-valued company serving 1,300+ enterprises across 85+ countries, with $79.5M in annual revenue and over $102M raised. Under his leadership, Yellow.ai developed proprietary LLM technology and a multi-LLM architecture trained on 16 billion conversations annually, processing support in 135+ languages across 35+ channels.
PolyAI
PolyAI builds enterprise voice assistants that answer customer calls and handle them end-to-end. The London- and San Francisco-based company spun out of Cambridge's dialogue systems lab in 2017, and now runs AI agents in 18 languages for brands like Marriott, Caesars, PG&E, FedEx and Hopper.
Sierra
Sierra is a San Francisco AI company building conversational agents that handle customer interactions for enterprises. Founded by Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor in 2023, it serves more than 40% of the Fortune 50 and was last valued at $15.8 billion after a $950M Series E in May 2026.
Suki
Suki is a healthcare AI company building an ambient voice assistant that listens to patient-clinician conversations and generates clinical notes, codes, and answers questions inside the EHR. Founded in 2017 by former Google and Flipkart product executive Punit Soni, Suki is used by hundreds of health systems and integrates with Epic, Oracle Health, athenahealth, and MEDITECH.
Vapi
Vapi is a San Francisco developer platform for building, testing, and deploying conversational voice AI agents over phone and web. It abstracts the messy plumbing of speech-to-text, LLMs, text-to-speech, and telephony so developers can ship human-sounding voice agents in minutes, with sub-500ms latency and enterprise-grade compliance.
Voximplant
Voximplant is a cloud communications and voice AI orchestration platform that lets developers and enterprises add programmable voice, video, messaging and AI agents to their apps without managing telecom infrastructure. Spun out of click-to-call pioneer Zingaya, it powers billions of calls a year for brands like Hyundai, Burger King, KFC, Glovo and Rappi.
Workstream
Workstream is an HR, hiring and payroll platform built for the deskless economy - the 80 million Americans who clock in by the hour at restaurants, gyms, car washes and franchises. Founded in 2017 by three immigrants in San Francisco, it uses texting, voice AI and automation to cut time-to-hire by roughly 70% for chains like Burger King, Jimmy John's and Chick-fil-A franchisees.
Vickram Saigal
Vickram Saigal is a seasoned product leader and co-founder with over a decade of experience at the intersection of technology, business strategy, and emerging markets. After stints at Bain & Company, the Gates Foundation in Ethiopia, IDEO.org, and Adobe - where he built low-latency identity and privacy systems for Adobe Advertising Cloud - he went on to serve as Head of Product at SaaS Labs (makers of JustCall), leading a 20+ person product and design team as the company scaled to a $42M Series B. In November 2024, he joined Fundamento as Co-Founder to drive product and technology innovation at one of India's leading AI-powered voice agent companies backed by Google, applying his decade of experience across global enterprise software to the frontier of AI-native customer experience.
Toma
Toma builds AI voice agents that answer the phone for U.S. car dealerships, booking service appointments, fielding parts requests, and saving BDC teams hundreds of hours a week. Founded by Monik Pamecha and Anthony Krivonos in early 2024, the company has raised a $17M Series A from Andreessen Horowitz and is approaching eight-figure ARR with more than 100 dealership customers.
Siddharth Jhunjhunwala
Siddharth Jhunjhunwala is the Founder and CEO of Web Spiders Group and co-founder of SpiderX AI, a San Francisco-based enterprise AI company he has been building since 2000. Starting his entrepreneurial journey in 1995 with network solutions out of Kolkata, he has grown Web Spiders into a 290-person global operation spanning San Jose, London, Singapore, and India, known for products like Gecko (an emotion-sensing AI recruiter that appeared on BBC One's The One Show), e2m.live (an enterprise event management platform), and SpiderX's conversational AI suite used across banking, retail, and government sectors.
Ahmed Reza
Ahmed Reza is the Founder and CEO of Yobi, an AI workforce platform that deploys synthetic agents to handle calls, texts, and social DMs for small businesses 24/7. A Milken Scholar at Cornell University who wrote image-processing software for NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, Reza went from child actor in Bangladesh to homeless student to serial entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. His previous ventures include Call Sumo (call tracking analytics) and Dental Web Now (AI dental marketing, acquired by NPI). Yobi raised a $2.37M seed round in 2023, reached $2.4M ARR by late 2025, and in 2026 partnered with Microsoft to develop a private foundation model for predictive behavioral intelligence.