After a surge in customer support calls last holiday season, Amazon Ring evaluated more than 40 AI voice vendors before selecting startup Vapi to handle its incoming phone traffic. Currently, Ring routes 100% of its incoming calls through Vapi’s platform.
The deal enabled Vapi to raise $50 million in Series B led by Peak XV Partners, giving it a post-money valuation of about $500 million, according to people familiar with the matter.
Ring turned to Vapi in the middle of the fourth quarter of last year when it was considering whether to expand its call center capacity, rely more on traditional automated phone systems, or deploy AI agents that can more naturally interact with customers, Vapi CEO Jordan Deersley (pictured above, left) told TechCrunch. Dearsley believes that Ring chose Vapi because it would give Ring engineers fine-grained control over how the AI agent behaves in real-world interactions with customers.
Jason Mitura, Amazon Ring’s vice president of software development, said Ring’s customer satisfaction scores have improved since implementing Vapi’s platform, and his team has been able to tailor the experience for AI agents without relying on engineering. “Many AI tools promise great results, and Vapi delivers,” he said.
Founded by Dearsley and University of Waterloo classmate Nikhil Gupta (pictured above, right), Vapi evolved from an AI therapist that Dearsley built in 2023 for conversations during daily walks. With experience at productivity startups Superpowered and Y Combinator, the pair found that while few people wanted the therapy product itself, startups were increasingly interested in the underlying low-latency voice infrastructure. This led the company to pivot to Vapi and launch the platform to the public in 2024.
Vapi provides tools for businesses to build, deploy, and manage voice agents across customer support, lead qualification, appointment scheduling, and outbound sales.
The company currently processes more than 1 billion calls through its platform, and says usage is accelerating as businesses move more customer interactions to AI systems. Dearsley said Vapi currently handles between 1 million and 5 million calls per day, with enterprise customers making up the majority of its call volume.
In addition to Amazon Ring, Vapi’s enterprise customers include Kavak, Instawork, New York Life, UnityAI, Cherry, and Intuit. The startup also operates a self-service developer platform used by over 1 million developers.
“Because we started out self-service and had such a wide range of developers, we had already done extensive battle testing before signing on with our first major enterprise customer,” Deersley said.
Other investors in the Series B round included Microsoft’s M12, Kleiner Perkins, and Bessemer Venture Partners, bringing Vapi’s total funding to $72 million. Investor sources told TechCrunch that the startup currently has a “healthy” eight-figure annual recurring revenue run rate.
Vapi is part of a growing wave of AI voice startups, including Sierra, Decagon, PolyAI, Bland, Retell, and Celebrities, as companies race to build systems that can handle customer conversations with minimal human involvement. Deersley said Vapi differentiates itself by focusing on the infrastructure and orchestration layer behind the voice agent rather than pre-packaged applications, especially for enterprises that want more control over reliability, compliance and model behavior.
The startup currently has about 100 employees and plans to use the new funding to expand its engineering, infrastructure and go-to-market teams.
“The biggest challenge is modeling and taming this amorphous beast,” Dearsley said. “If we can do that, we can provide value to the world.”
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