AI voice startup Vapi reaches $500M valuation, beating 40 rivals for Amazon Ring deal

During last year’s holiday rush, Amazon Ring was overwhelmed by a spike in customer-support calls. The company evaluated over 40 AI voice vendors before selecting the startup Vapi to manage its inbound phone traffic. Today, every single call Ring receives is routed through Vapi’s platform.

That high-profile deployment helped Vapi secure a $50 million Series B funding round led by Peak XV Partners, at a valuation of roughly $500 million post-investment, according to a source familiar with the deal.

Ring initially reached out to Vapi in mid-Q4 last year, when it was deciding whether to expand its call-center capacity, lean more heavily on traditional automated phone systems, or deploy AI agents capable of more natural customer interactions, Vapi CEO Jordan Dearsley told TechCrunch. Dearsley believes Ring chose Vapi because it gave Ring’s engineers granular control over how the AI agents behaved during live calls.

Jason Mitura, vice president of software development at Amazon Ring, noted that customer satisfaction scores improved after adopting Vapi’s platform. He added that Ring’s teams could fine-tune the AI agent experience without needing engineering support. “A lot of AI tools promise great outcomes , Vapi has delivered on them,” Mitura said.

Vapi was founded by Dearsley and his University of Waterloo classmate Nikhil Gupta. The idea emerged from an AI therapist Dearsley built in 2023 for conversations during his daily walks. After going through Y Combinator with their productivity startup Superpowered, the pair realized that while few wanted the therapy product, many startups were eager for the low-latency voice infrastructure beneath it. That insight led them to pivot and launch Vapi publicly in 2024.

Vapi offers tools that help companies build, deploy, and manage voice agents for customer support, lead qualification, appointment scheduling, and outbound sales.

The startup reports handling more than 1 billion calls through its platform to date, with usage accelerating as enterprises shift more customer interactions to AI systems. Dearsley said Vapi currently processes between 1 million and 5 million calls daily, with enterprise customers accounting for most of that volume.

Beyond Amazon Ring, Vapi’s enterprise clients include Kavak, Instawork, New York Life, UnityAI, Cherry, and Intuit. The company also operates a self-serve developer platform used by over 1 million developers.

“Because we started from self-serve and had such a wide developer footprint, we were already battle-tested at significant scale before we signed our first major enterprise customer,” Dearsley said.

Other investors in the Series B round included Microsoft’s M12, Kleiner Perkins, and Bessemer Venture Partners, bringing Vapi’s total funding to $72 million. The startup is currently at an annual recurring revenue run rate in the “healthy” eight figures, according to an investor source.

Vapi joins a growing cohort of AI voice startups that includes Sierra, Decagon, PolyAI, Bland, Retell, and ElevenLabs, as companies race to build systems that can handle customer conversations with minimal human involvement. Dearsley said Vapi sets itself apart by focusing less on pre-packaged applications and more on the infrastructure and orchestration layer behind voice agents, especially for enterprises that demand tight control over reliability, compliance, and model behavior.

The startup currently employs around 100 people and plans to use the new capital to expand its engineering, infrastructure, and go-to-market teams.

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