Amazon Ring Tested 40 AI Voice Platforms and Chose This $500M Startup
When Amazon Ring needed to manage a flood of customer support calls during last year’s holiday season, it did not make a quick decision. The company evaluated more than 40 AI voice vendors before landing on Vapi to handle its inbound phone traffic. Today, Ring routes 100% of its inbound calls through the platform.
That high-profile win has now turned into serious momentum for the startup. Vapi has raised a $50 million Series B led by Peak XV Partners at a valuation of around $500 million. Other investors in the round include Microsoft’s M12, Kleiner Perkins, and Bessemer Venture Partners, bringing Vapi’s total funding to $72 million.
The Vapi AI voice platform gives companies the tools to build, deploy, and manage voice agents for customer support, lead qualification, appointment scheduling, and outbound sales. Ring’s VP of software development Jason Mitura said the company’s customer satisfaction scores improved after deploying the platform, and that teams were able to tune the AI agent experience without depending on engineering.
Vapi was founded by Jordan Dearsley and Nikhil Gupta, both University of Waterloo classmates. Dearsley originally built an AI therapist in 2023 for conversations during his daily walks, but the pair quickly noticed that startups were more interested in the low-latency voice infrastructure powering it than the therapy product itself. That insight led them to pivot and launch Vapi publicly in 2024. The company had previously gone through Y Combinator with a productivity startup called Superpowered.
The growth numbers behind the Vapi AI voice platform are hard to ignore. The startup says it has handled more than 1 billion calls to date, currently processing between 1 million and 5 million calls per day, with enterprise customers driving the bulk of that volume. Its enterprise business has grown 10-fold since early 2025 as companies shift customer support and sales calls to AI agents.
Beyond Amazon Ring, Vapi counts Kavak, Instawork, New York Life, UnityAI, Cherry, and Intuit among its enterprise clients. The platform has also been used by more than 1 million developers on its self-serve tier.
Vapi operates in a crowded but fast-growing space. Competitors include Sierra, Decagon, PolyAI, Bland, Retell, and ElevenLabs, as companies race to build systems capable of handling customer conversations with minimal human involvement. Dearsley says what sets Vapi apart is its focus on the infrastructure and orchestration layer beneath voice agents, particularly for enterprises that want deep control over reliability, compliance, and model behavior.
The startup currently has around 100 employees and plans to use the new funding to expand its engineering, infrastructure, and go-to-market teams.
