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Vapi hits $500M valuation after Amazon Ring picks it over 40 AI voice rivals

Peak XV led a $50M Series B after Ring routed 100% of inbound calls through Vapi, which now processes up to 5M calls a day.

Jaeden Schafer
Editor in Chief · · 4 min read
Vapi hits $500M valuation after Amazon Ring picks it over 40 AI voice rivals

Vapi raised a $50M Series B led by Peak XV Partners at a roughly $500M post-money valuation, after Amazon Ring picked the voice-AI startup over more than 40 rival vendors and routed 100% of its inbound customer-support calls through Vapi's platform. The round brings total funding to $72M and lands as the company processes between 1 million and 5 million calls a day for enterprise customers.

Microsoft's M12, Kleiner Perkins, and Bessemer Venture Partners joined the round. An investor told TechCrunch that Vapi is at an eight-figure annual recurring revenue run rate, with enterprise accounts driving the bulk of volume. The startup says it has now handled more than 1 billion calls cumulatively across its platform.

The Ring deployment is the marquee reference. Amazon Ring went vendor-shopping in mid-Q4 last year, during a holiday-season surge in inbound calls, weighing whether to expand its call center, lean on traditional IVR systems, or bet on AI agents. After evaluating 40+ AI voice vendors, it chose Vapi and now sends every inbound call through it.

Key facts

  • 01Vapi raised a $50M Series B led by Peak XV Partners at a $500M post-money valuation.
  • 02Amazon Ring evaluated 40+ AI voice vendors before routing 100% of inbound calls through Vapi.
  • 03The platform has handled 1B+ calls and currently processes 1M to 5M calls per day.
  • 04Vapi's self-serve developer platform has been used by 1M+ developers; total funding now stands at $72M.
  • 05The 100-person company is at an eight-figure annual recurring revenue run rate.

Chief Executive Jordan Dearsley said Ring picked Vapi because the platform gave Ring engineers granular control over agent behavior in live customer interactions. Jason Mitura, vice president of software development at Amazon Ring, said customer satisfaction scores improved after deployment and non-engineers could tune the agent experience directly. "A lot of AI tools promise great outcomes — Vapi has delivered on them," Mitura said.

Vapi now processes between 1 million and 5 million calls a day and has handled more than 1 billion calls in total, with Amazon Ring routing 100% of its inbound traffic through the platform.
Jaeden Schafer

Vapi's origin is unusual for an enterprise infrastructure company. Dearsley and University of Waterloo classmate Nikhil Gupta — both Y Combinator alumni from an earlier productivity startup called Superpowered — built an AI therapist in 2023 for Dearsley's daily walks. Few users wanted the therapy product, but startups kept asking about the low-latency voice infrastructure underneath. The pair pivoted and launched Vapi publicly in 2024.

The product is positioned as an infrastructure and orchestration layer for voice agents rather than a packaged application, covering customer support, lead qualification, appointment scheduling, and outbound sales. More than 1 million developers have used the self-serve platform. "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.

Beyond Amazon Ring, Vapi's enterprise roster includes Kavak, Instawork, New York Life, UnityAI, Cherry, and Intuit. Dearsley said the focus on reliability, compliance, and model behavior — rather than vertical SaaS apps — is what differentiates Vapi from competitors selling finished agents.

That competitor list is crowded and getting more so. Sierra, Decagon, PolyAI, Bland, Retell, and ElevenLabs are all chasing the same enterprise voice budgets, and several of them have raised at higher valuations on the strength of marquee logos rather than usage. Vapi's pitch — a developer-first platform with a billion calls of production exposure before it sold its first big enterprise contract — is the counter-positioning.

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Vapi has around 100 employees and plans to spend the Series B on engineering, infrastructure, and go-to-market hiring. "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."

The open question is durability. Voice-agent infrastructure is becoming a commodity layer fast, and the same enterprises buying from Vapi today are also piloting Sierra, Decagon, and ElevenLabs. A 40-vendor bake-off at Ring is a strong proof point, but the next 40-vendor bake-off at the next Fortune 500 buyer is already running, and model quality from underlying providers shifts every quarter.

For the AI voice category, the Vapi round is a useful signal about where enterprise dollars are actually landing. Buyers are no longer just picking the best demo — they are running structured evaluations against 40-plus vendors and selecting on engineer-facing control, observability, and tuning. That favors infrastructure plays over packaged-agent plays, at least at the top of the enterprise market, and explains why an eight-figure ARR company can clear a $500M mark in 2026 without a flashy consumer product attached.

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