Vapi, a San Francisco startup that sells the plumbing behind AI phone agents rather than the agents themselves, has raised a $50 million Series B led by Peak XV Partners at a post-money valuation of about $500 million, the company told TechCrunch on May 12. Microsoft's M12, Kleiner Perkins and Bessemer Venture Partners also joined the round, which brings Vapi's total funding to roughly $72 million.
The headline customer is Amazon's Ring. According to the report, Ring evaluated more than 40 AI voice vendors before choosing Vapi, and now routes 100% of its inbound customer support calls through the platform. "A lot of AI tools promise great outcomes — Vapi has delivered on them," a Ring vice president told TechCrunch. CEO Jordan Dearsley said Ring approached Vapi in the middle of the fourth quarter of last year, while it was weighing whether to expand its call centers, lean harder on traditional touch-tone systems, or hand calls to AI agents that could respond more conversationally.
Infrastructure, not apps
Dearsley, who co-founded Vapi with University of Waterloo classmate Nikhil Gupta, frames the company as an orchestration layer rather than a packaged product. The pitch to enterprises is control: the ability to swap underlying speech and language models, enforce compliance rules, and tune reliability without being locked into one vendor's assistant. "The golden problem is taking this indeterminate beast that is a model and taming it," he told TechCrunch.
That positioning has scaled quickly. Vapi says it has now handled more than 1 billion calls and processes between 1 million and 5 million per day, with enterprises driving most of the volume. Beyond Ring, named customers include Kavak, Instawork, New York Life, UnityAI, Cherry and Intuit, alongside more than a million self-serve developers. The company reports annual recurring revenue in the "healthy" eight figures and employs around 100 people. Vapi grew out of an AI therapist Dearsley built in 2023; the team went through Y Combinator under the name Superpowered before pivoting to voice infrastructure and launching publicly in 2024.
Why it matters
The round is another data point in a fast-consolidating voice AI market where the winners increasingly look like infrastructure providers — Vapi, ElevenLabs, Deepgram and a handful of others — rather than the dozens of vertical "AI receptionist" apps built on top of them. A marquee win like Ring, decided through a competitive bake-off, is exactly the kind of reference enterprise buyers point to when they justify replacing call-center headcount with agents. Vapi says it will spend the new money on engineering, infrastructure and go-to-market hiring as it tries to stay ahead of a crowded field.
