Voice AI startup Vapi has hit a $500M valuation after winning over 40 Amazon Ring rounds

Amazon Ring, faced with a surge in customer service calls during the holiday season last year, evaluated more than 40 AI voice sellers before choosing a startup. A glove to handle the volume of his incoming calls. Today, Ring handles 100% of its incoming calls through the Vapi platform.

This deployment helped Vapi raise a $50 million Series B led by Peak XV Partners at a price of $500 million after the sale, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Ring turned to Vapi in the middle of Q4 last year, when they were trying to expand the contact center, rely more on regular phone calls, or send AI assistants who can respond naturally to customers, Vapi’s Chief Executive Jordan Dearsley (pictured above, left) told TechCrunch. Dearsley believes that Ring chose Vapi because it would give Ring’s engineers little control over how AI agents interact with customers.

Jason Mitura, vice president of software development at Amazon Ring, said that Ring’s customer traffic increased after deploying the Vapi platform and that the company’s teams were able to dial in the AI ​​agent’s experience without requiring engineering. “Many AI tools promise great results – Vapi has delivered,” he said.

Founded by Dearsley and his University of Waterloo colleague Nikhil Gupta (pictured above, right), Vapi grew out of the AI ​​medical expert Dearsley built in 2023 to chat with on his daily commute. The pair, who went through Y Combinator with startup Superpowered, found that while few people wanted the product itself, startups were more interested in the noise-reduction tools underneath. This led them to pivot to Vapi and launch the platform publicly in 2024.

Vapi provides business tools to build, deploy, and manage voice assistants for customer service, lead qualification, time management, and outbound sales.

The startup says it has now handled more than 1 billion calls through its platform, and usage is increasing as businesses move customer interactions to AI systems. Vapi, Dearsley said, is currently making between 1 million and 5 million calls per day, with business customers accounting for most of that volume.

In addition to Amazon Ring, Vapi’s enterprise customers include Kavak, Instawork, New York Life, UnityAI, Cherry, and Intuit. The startup also uses an automated platform that has been used by more than 1 million developers.

“Because we started in-house and had a lot of developers, we were already tested on a large scale before we signed our first customer,” Dearsley said.

Other investors who participated in the Series B include Microsoft M12, Kleiner Perkins, and Bessemer Venture Partners, which brought Vapi’s total funding to $72 million. The startup is facing an annual risk that also comes with eight “healthy” benefits, a financial source told TechCrunch.

Vapi is part of a growing group of voice AI startups that includes Sierra, Decagon, PolyAI, Bland, Retell, and ElevenLabs, as companies rush to create machines that can converse with customers with minimal human interaction. Dearsley said Vapi differentiates itself by focusing less on pre-installed content and more on the architecture and music behind voice assistants, especially for businesses looking to improve reliability, compliance, and model performance.

The startup currently has about 100 employees and plans to use the new funding to expand its engineering, construction, and go-to-market teams.

“The golden challenge is to take an unknown animal that is a model and domesticate it,” Dearsley said. “If you can do that, then you can give value to the world.”