AI startup Vapi reaches $500 million valuation after beating Amazon Ring by more than 40 competitors

Amazon Ring, facing a spike in customer support calls during the holiday season last year, evaluated more than 40 voice AI vendors before selecting startup Vapi to handle incoming phone traffic. Today, Ring routes 100% of its incoming calls through the Vapi platform.

The rollout helped Vapi raise a $50 million Series B led by Peak XV Partners at a valuation of about $500 million after the investment, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Ring turned to Vapi in the middle of the fourth quarter last year, when it was considering whether to expand call center capacity, rely more on traditional automated phone systems, or deploy AI agents that could respond more naturally to customers, Vapi CEO Jordan Dearsley (pictured above, left) told TechCrunch. Dearsley believes Ring chose Vapi because if offered Ring engineers fine-grained control over how AI agents behave in direct interactions with customers.

Jason Mitora, vice president of software development at Amazon Ring, said Ring’s customer satisfaction scores improved after deploying the Vapi platform and that the company’s teams were able to fine-tune the AI ​​agent experience without relying on engineering. “A lot of AI tools promise great results – and Vapi has delivered them,” he said.

Founded by Dearsley and his University of Waterloo colleague Nikhil Gupta (pictured above, right), Fabi grew out of an AI processor that Dearsley built in 2023 to carry conversations during his daily walks. The pair, who went through Y Combinator with productivity startup Superpowered, discovered that although few people wanted the therapeutic product itself, startups were increasingly interested in the low-latency voice infrastructure underneath. This has led them to focus on Vapi and launch the platform publicly in 2024.

Vapi provides tools for businesses to create, deploy, and manage voice agents across customer support, lead qualification, appointment scheduling, and outbound sales.

The startup says it has now handled more than a billion calls through its platform, with usage accelerating as organizations move more customer interactions to AI systems. Vapi currently handles between 1 million and 5 million calls per day, with enterprise customers accounting for the bulk of that volume, Dearsley said.

In addition to Amazon Ring, Vapi’s enterprise customers include Kavak, Instawork, New York Life, UnityAI, Cherry, and Intuit. The startup also runs a self-service developer platform used by over a million developers.

“Because we started from self-service and had such a broad developer footprint, we had already been tested extensively before we signed on with our first large enterprise client,” Dearsley said.

Other investors participating in the Series B round include Microsoft M12, Kleiner Perkins, and Bessemer Venture Partners, bringing Vapi’s total funding to $72 million. An investor source told TechCrunch that the startup currently has a recurring annual revenue run rate in the “healthy” eight-digits.

Vapi is part of a growing wave of artificial voice startups that includes Sierra, Decagon, PolyAI, Bland, Retell, and ElevenLabs, as companies race to build systems capable of handling customer conversations with minimal human involvement. Vapi differentiates itself by focusing less on pre-packaged applications and more on the infrastructure and orchestration layer behind voice agents, especially for organizations that want greater control over reliability, compliance and typical behavior, Dearsley said.

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

“The golden problem is to take this indeterminate beast that is a model and tame it,” Dearsley said. “If you can do that, you can provide value to the world.”