VoiceRun gets $5.5M in seed funding to give enterprises more control over voice AI agents – News

VoiceRun, a startup that’s helping enterprises to develop voice-enabled artificial intelligence agents that they control, has raised $5.5 million in seed funding to help customers move beyond simple pilots and demonstrations and deploy voice-powered applications at large scale.

Today’s round was led by Flybridge Capital Partners and saw participation from RRE Ventures and Link Ventures. VoiceRun said the funds will be used to boost its go-to-market efforts as it gears up its platform for prime time.

VoiceRun’s main pitch is helping enterprises to develop voice AI agents that meet the strictest of reliability, security and governance requirements, which it says is essential for organizations seeking to deploy them in production. It does this through a novel code-first approach and forward-deployed engineering model that allows technical teams to ship voice AI agents rapidly without giving up control of them.

With its platform, customers retain full ownership of their application layer code, while VoiceRun provides the orchestration layer they need to leverage third-party large language models to power those apps. It also provides tools for turn-taking, telephony and latency management, so customers can continuously assess their voice applications, iterate and improve them over time.

The startup, which is targeting voice AI applications in industries including restaurants, insurance, banking and telecommunications, says there are three core components to its platform. The first is the infrastructure and orchestration layer, which uses pluggable LLM, speech-to-text and text-to-speech pipelines, interruptible prompts and one-click telephony to enable enterprises to piece together voice agents using third-party models.

These are all accessed via standard Git or command line workflows, which allows teams able to integrate internal APIs, transform data and complex model logic. Finally, it provides a library of enterprise-grade tools, including LLM-as-a-judge evaluations, telemetry and synthetic data generation for regression testing and targeted model enhancements. With these tools, companies can quickly identify where their AI agents need improvement.

Crucially, VoiceRun also offers flexible deployment options, including public cloud environments, virtual private clouds and on-premises, to meet its customer’s data and compliance requirements.

Early customer rollouts span phone ordering and reservations, contact center triage, and lead qualification. These are use cases where milliseconds matter and organizational controls often slow adoption. VoiceRun’s deployment flexibility, including VPC options and approved model lists, allows enterprises to work within existing security and compliance requirements while still shipping new voice experiences.

VoiceRun co-founder and Chief Executive Nick Leonard said AI chatbots such as Gemini, which can converse with users in the same way as if they were talking to another human, highlight the enormous potential of automated, voice AI agents in areas such as customer service. A lot of companies have already created impressive pilot projects, but very few have been able to ramp them up into full production deployments, he said.

“Many enterprise projects stall between an impressive demo and a dependable production rollout,” he explained. “We give teams code ownership, deployment flexibility and deep observability so they can move fast, clear security reviews and deliver production-ready solutions at scale.”

Flybridge Capital Partners co-founder Chip Hazard said it’s fast becoming clear that voice is going to be the preferred interface for many AI applications because of the convenience it offers to users. “Bringing these applications into production presents a paralyzing build-versus-buy decision,” he said. “VoiceRun offers the missing piece which empowers enterprises to build, govern and scale world-class voice deployments.”

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