Our investment in Vapi: the voice AI developer platform
Bessemer Venture Partners leads Vapi's $20 million Series A financing.
Byron Deeter, Mike Droesch, Sam Bondy, Darsh Patel & Libbie Frost
Published on Dec 13, 2024
Voice AI isn’t just an upgrade to software’s UI. It’s transforming how businesses and customers connect.
Despite telephony being an over 150 year-old technology, voice still remains the dominant mode of communication for most businesses. In large industries like healthcare, legal services, home services, insurance, and logistics, businesses rely on phone-based communication to convey nuanced information more effectively, provide more personalized support or services, handle critical transactions, and address time-sensitive needs.
We’re in the midst of a Cambrian explosion of voice AI infrastructure that has driven our conviction in the market opportunity in this space. Developers are in a better position than ever to integrate AI voice capabilities into their products and services to help eliminate long wait times, automatically resolve customer issues, and scale voice agents infinitely to meet spikes in customer demand any time of day or night. That said, building, deploying, and managing conversational voice agents at scale is a substantial challenge.
This is why we’re thrilled to lead Vapi’s $20 million Series A financing. Vapi is building the leading developer platform for conversational voice agents, abstracting away the complexity of building these agents and managing real-time infrastructure, and making it easy for anyone to deploy human-level voice experiences.
Vapi provides a 10x improvement on the development experience for voice agents. Its elegant platform solves the hard engineering problems required to manage real-time voice infrastructure and build enterprise-grade voice agents, including the orchestration of third-party speech-to-text (STT) models, LLMs, and text-to-speech (TTS) models.
Vapi’s architecture is carefully designed to help developers create agents that sound lifelike without sacrificing the control and determinism that enterprise customers demand. From its proprietary real-time audio model that can discern speakers’ emotional inflections, to bulletproof scalability, reliability, and fault tolerance, no detail has gone untested. This level of detail stands out because it addresses a core enterprise AI problem: AI models are probabilistic in nature, yet highly regulated industries—think financial services, healthcare, and insurance—require deterministic output. Vapi solves this conundrum by breaking conversational flows into digestible, discrete blocks.
Our conviction to lead Vapi’s Series A came especially from our strong belief in its team. In a space that is evolving as fast as AI, we believe that execution, customer obsession and product velocity matter far more today than ever before.
We’ve been impressed by how quickly cofounders Jordan Dearsley and Nikhil Gupta have built a robust platform with a vibrant community of enthusiastic developers, all with a lean and agile team. The two Waterloo engineers have iterated extremely quickly—it’s not uncommon for us to hear that a feature request made on a Friday evening is in production on Saturday morning.
Vapi is rapidly growing, and customers praise its ergonomic developer experience, extensibility, speed-to-execution, and reliability.
We’re thrilled to partner with Jordan, Nikhil, and the rest of the Vapi team as they enable developers to dream bigger about the range of voice experiences they can power.
Contributors
Byron Deeter
Partner
Byron Deeter is a leading investor in AI, Cloud, Frontier Technology, and the Business of Sports. He co-authored Bessemer’s iconic 10 Laws of Cloud Computing, the Bessemer Forbes Cloud 100, the BVP Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index, and Bessemer’s STRIVE program for executive health and wellness. Byron works closely alongside many of the best founders in the cloud world, with 26 of Byron’s investments currently valued above $1 billion each, including 13 IPOs and counting.
Byron first raised a Series A with Bessemer back in 2000, as CEO and founder of Trigo Technologies. His company grew to be one of the first global SaaS companies, reaching profitability and was successfully sold to IBM. Byron foresaw that cloud computing would not only change the way people built new technologies but also how The Cloud would systematically run the world. In 2005, Byron returned to Bessemer, this time to help lead the firm’s global cloud practice.
Byron graduated with honors from The University of California, Berkeley, where he met his then college sweetheart and now wife. Byron is a perennial Midas List investor, past Chairman of the National Venture Capital Association, partner/owner of the San Francisco 49ers and Leeds United, as well as an active board member/advisor to numerous causes including the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Foundation, U.C. Berkeley Foundation, Pledge 1% and Cal Rugby. Although he’s a four-time Rugby Collegiate National Champion and serial Ironman finisher, he’s largely converted to leisure sports of golf, wake surfing, and skiing with his wife and three children.
Mike Droesch
Partner
Mike Droesch is a partner in the Boston office primarily focusing on AI applications, cybersecurity, supply chain software, and B2B marketplaces. He currently serves on the board of directors for Tackle, Curri, Raft, Cypress, Netography, Optimal Dynamics, and VendorPM.
Previously, Mike worked with a few venture-backed startups in Boston, including two Bessemer portfolio companies, Fuze and InsightSquared, where he supported sales operations and analytics efforts. He started his career as a systems engineer and then spent nearly three years in management consulting at Navigant, where he helped companies build new businesses around emerging energy and infrastructure technologies in the U.S. and Middle East.
He holds an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management, a Master’s Degree in naval architecture and engineering from the University of Michigan, and a degree in mechanical engineering from Tufts University.
Sam Bondy
Vice President
Sam is a vice president based out of San Francisco and primarily focuses on early and growth stage cloud and AI.
Prior to venture capital, Sam began his career in Technology, Media, and Telecommunications investment banking at J.P. Morgan where he focused on M&A and capital markets transactions for both private and public companies. He then joined Harvest Partners, a private equity firm in New York, focusing on software and business services buyout. Most recently, Sam moved into earlier stage investing where he worked at Soma Capital primarily focusing on software and fintech.
Sam grew up in New York City and first attended McGill University in Montreal, before graduating summa cum laude from SUNY Binghamton where he received a B.A. in Economics. Outside of work, he is an aspiring outdoorsman, a (very) novice golfer, skier, surfer, and loves to run, read, travel, and listen to podcasts.
Darsh Patel
Investor
Darsh is an investor based out of Bessemer’s New York City office. He focuses on enterprise software with a particular interest in infrastructure, cybersecurity, and vertical SaaS.
Prior to joining Bessemer, Darsh worked in operations at Rightway Healthcare and had roles spanning engineering and product management at other early-stage startups.
Darsh graduated from the Johns Hopkins University with general and departmental honors with a B.S. in biomedical engineering and applied mathematics. In his free time, you can find him bouldering, running, rooting for the Yankees, Rangers, and Knicks, or watching Formula 1.
Libbie Frost
Investor
Libbie Frost is an investor in the New York office where she focuses on vertical software, fintech, and healthcare.
Before joining Bessemer, Libbie worked at Accel on their Growth Team in Palo Alto and Insight Partners on their Diligence and Growth Strategy Team in New York City.
Libbie graduated magna cum laude from the University of Notre Dame where she earned her BBA in Finance and BA in Industrial Design. While in school, she helped launch and grow the Notre Dame Venture Capital Club and was an alum of Girls Who Invest. Libbie has studied the Italian Renaissance in Florence, Italy, and in her free time she enjoys painting murals, running with friends, and reading a nice biography.
