Amazon Ring taps Vapi for AI voice, fueling $50M funding round

AI voice infrastructure startup Vapi has raised $50 million in a Series B round—the second stage of venture capital financing—valuing the company at around $500 million. The investment follows a major deployment with Amazon Ring, which now routes 100% of its inbound calls through Vapi’s platform. Amazon Ring turned to Vapi in mid-Q4 last year when deciding whether to expand call-center capacity, rely on traditional automated phone systems, or deploy AI agents. After evaluating more than 40 rival AI voice vendors, Ring chose Vapi because it offered engineers granular control over live customer interactions. Jason Mitura, vice president of software development at Amazon Ring, stated that customer satisfaction scores improved after the deployment, noting that Vapi delivered on the outcomes that many AI tools only promise.

The startup has scaled rapidly, handling more than 1 billion calls to date. Vapi currently processes between 1 million and 5 million calls a day, with enterprise customers accounting for the bulk of this volume. Alongside its enterprise business, which includes clients like Kavak, Instawork, New York Life, UnityAI, Cherry, and Intuit, Vapi operates a self-serve developer platform used by more than 1 million developers.

Co-founded by Jordan Dearsley and Nikhil Gupta, Vapi grew out of an AI therapist built in 2023, before the founders pivoted to low-latency voice infrastructure and launched the platform publicly in 2024. Dearsley, who serves as chief executive, noted that because the company started from a self-serve model and established a wide developer footprint, its systems were already battle-tested at significant scale before signing its first major enterprise customer. He explains that Vapi differentiates itself by focusing on the infrastructure and orchestration layer—the backend systems that manage and control AI models—rather than pre-packaged applications. “The golden problem is taking this indeterminate beast that is a model and taming it. If you can do that, then you can provide value to the world,” Dearsley said.

The Series B round was led by Peak XV Partners. Other investors participating in the round included:

• Microsoft’s M12
• Kleiner Perkins
• Bessemer Venture Partners

This brings Vapi’s total funding to $72 million. An investor source reported that the startup’s annual recurring revenue run rate is in the healthy eight figures. Vapi currently has around 100 employees and plans to use the new capital to expand its engineering, infrastructure, and go-to-market teams.

Why it matters

Vapi’s success highlights a broader shift toward specialized infrastructure for AI voice agents. As enterprises move customer interactions to AI, demand is growing for robust backend systems that manage and control these models to provide granular control and reliability.