Voice AI startup Vapi hits $500M after winning Amazon Ring over 40 competitors

Amazon Ring, dealing with an increase in customer support calls during last year’s holiday season, evaluated more than 40 AI voice vendors before choosing Vapi first to handle incoming call traffic. Today, Ikhalisa sends 100% of its incoming calls through the Vapi platform.

That deployment helped Vapi raise a $50 million Series B round led by Peak XV Partners for an estimated $500 million after the investment, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Ring turned to Vapi in mid-Q4 last year, when it was weighing whether to expand into the phone space, rely more heavily on automated phone systems, or roll out AI agents that can respond naturally to customers, Vapi CEO Jordan Dearsley (pictured above, left) told TechCrunch. Dearsley believes Ring chose Vapi because it gave Ring engineers collective control over how AI agents behaved in live customer interactions.

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

Created by Dearsley and his University of Waterloo classmate Nikhil Gupta (pictured above, right), Vapi grew out of the AI ​​therapist Dearsley built in 2023 to chat with on his daily commute. The duo, who went through Y Combinator and manufacturing startup Superpowered, found that while few people were looking for the medical product itself, startups were more interested in the low-key infrastructure behind it. This led them to turn to Vapi and launch the platform publicly in 2024.

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

The startup says it has now hosted more than 1 billion calls through its platform, and usage is growing as businesses move more customer interactions to AI systems. Vapi, Dearsley said, currently handles between 1 and 5 million calls per day, with business customers making up the bulk 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 a self-service developer platform used by over 1 million developers.

“Because we started out as a freelancer and had such a broad spectrum of developers, we got to test it on a large scale before we signed our first enterprise customer,” Dearsley said.

Other investors participating in the Series B round include Microsoft’s M12, Kleiner Perkins, and Bessemer Venture Partners, bringing Vapi’s funding to $72 million. The startup is currently on a “healthy” eight-figure revenue cycle, an investor source told TechCrunch.

Vapi is part of a growing wave of voice AI startups including Sierra, Decagon, PolyAI, Bland, Retell, and ElevenLabs, as companies rush to build systems that can handle customer conversations with minimal human involvement. Dearsley said Vapi differentiates itself by focusing less on prepackaged applications and more on the infrastructure and orchestration layer behind voice agents, especially for businesses that want greater control over reliability, compliance, and modeled 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 problem is taking this strange model beast and taming it,” Dearsley said. “If you can do that, you can give value to the world.”