At our Cerebral Valley Summit in London last June, GV Managing Partner Tom Hulme predicted that voice would be the next frontier for an AI interface — and six months later, a series of hot voice funding rounds shows he was probably right.
Last week, ElevenLabs officially announced a $500 million Series D round in a 11 billion dollars assessment. This followed voice customer support startup Decagon, led by CEO Jesse Zhang (photo), closing a $250 million, Series D of Coatue and Index, and voice model startup Deepgram raising a $130 million, Series C three weeks ago. Gradium, based in Paris, has raised a $70 Million Seed in December.
Although voice AI is a horizontal tool, customer service voice agents are one of the most popular use cases for voice AI, where businesses can ask AI to handle the bulk of their inbound calls. Beyond Decagon, more notable entries include Bret Taylor’s unicorn startup Sierra and MavenAGI.
One startup, Phonic, builds both its own voice models and orchestration software to help its customers successfully run voice agents for all kinds of use cases. The largest so far is for customer support, but its models have been used for trucking logistics management and healthcare back-office work.
Lux Capital supported their 4 million dollars round in 2024, and we’ve heard from two sources that they have now raised a Series A round from First Round Capital and Felicis.
Existing customer support startups are also adopting voice. Netomi, for example, launched voice support as part of its product offerings and successfully attracted large enterprise customers like Paramount+, United Airlines and DraftKings. The startup was backed by WndrCo, Index Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Y Combinator, and Fin Capital, and we hear they are close to closing a new 9-figure Series C round.
OpenAI has built its own speech models, but efforts stalled a bit last year and researchers complained internally that their performance lagged behind that of their text models. His latest vocal efforts should be released during the first quarter of this year, by The information.
Not all major laboratories are so optimistic. Anthropic Product Manager Mike Krieger expressed some skepticism about voice as the next big medium at our Cerebral Valley AI Summit in November last year, instead noting the resilience and usefulness of the text box. Claude received vocal abilities as a way to enable hands-free use.
Early-stage venture capital firms are interested in backing smaller vertical voice support startups, where a founder can have a unique advantage when navigating a regulated market.