Vapi Scores $50 Million Series B, Valued Near $500 Million After Amazon Ring Win

Amazon Ring has handed all of its incoming phone traffic to Vapi, a startup that this week closed a $50 million Series B round that places the company at roughly a $500 million post-money valuation. Peak XV Partners led the financing, which also included backing from Microsoft’s M12, Kleiner Perkins and Bessemer Venture Partners, lifting Vapi’s total capital to about $72 million, the company said. An investor briefed on the matter described the startup’s annual recurring revenue as a healthy eight-figure run rate.

Ring began testing voice AI options in the fourth quarter last year after holiday-season demand pushed up support volumes. The e-commerce security unit reviewed more than 40 suppliers before selecting Vapi, according to people familiar with the evaluation. Since the deployment, Ring reports higher customer satisfaction and says its product and support teams can adjust how the automated agents behave without heavy engineering intervention — a crucial capability as firms try to avoid hiring large numbers of seasonal staff.

Vapi was founded by Jordan Dearsley and Nikhil Gupta, classmates at the University of Waterloo who previously worked on a productivity app through Y Combinator. The idea for the company emerged from an experimental conversational program Dearsley built in 2023; interest from other startups in the fast, real-time audio stack prompted the founders to pivot from a therapy-oriented app to a voice infrastructure business and launch the platform publicly in 2024.

The company offers tools to create, deploy and manage voice agents across use cases such as customer support, appointment booking, lead screening and outbound outreach. Vapi says its network has carried more than one billion calls, and today the platform handles between one million and five million calls a day, with large corporate clients accounting for most of that traffic. The startup also maintains a self-serve developer tier that it says has attracted over one million developers.

Vapi sits in a crowded field of firms building spoken-language systems; rivals include Decagon, PolyAI, ElevenLabs, Sierra and others chasing automated customer conversations. Vapi’s pitch centers on the control layer: giving enterprise customers tools to govern reliability, compliance and model behavior rather than shipping turnkey chatbots. An industry analyst who follows contact-center technology said that firms in regulated sectors are likely to gravitate to vendors that expose fine-grained controls and audit traces.

The company employs about 100 people and will direct the new capital toward product engineering, infrastructure and commercial expansion, executives said. The founders told reporters they plan to tighten the guardrails around model outputs so businesses can put automated voices on the front lines without risking errant responses — a problem that, if solved, could make these systems more broadly useful for everyday callers.