Voice AI startup Rime secures $24M to help businesses handle calls without the hassle

Rime, a San Francisco-based voice AI startup, has raised $24 million in Series A funding to refine how enterprises manage customer calls. Unlike many competitors that rely on web-scraped audio, Rime operates its own recording studio to collect conversational data, aiming to reduce the customization burden for clients in sales, marketing, and support. The round was led by M13 Ventures, with participation from Twilio Ventures, Corazon Capital, and others.

Founded in 2022 by former Stanford PhD student Lily Clifford, ex-Amazon Alexa engineer Brooke Larson, and Stanford engineer Ares Geovanos, Rime focuses on tuning its voice models to nail pronunciations for specific brands and industries. Its phoneme-based architecture adapts to different terms without requiring clients to retrain models. The startup serves customers in food service, healthcare, airlines, and fintech, including Mayo Clinic, Dialpad, and Upstart.

Despite advances in voice AI, Clifford notes that enterprises still prefer legacy IVR systems because current AI voice technology hasn't matched their effectiveness. "Talking with a voice AI agent is not the most compelling experience for the end user," she said. Rime is now shifting from a pipeline of separate models to developing better speech-to-speech models to reduce latency, improve turn-taking, and handle background noise. With the new funding, the 35-person team plans to hire for model development, engineering, and partnerships. The company recently brought on Rafael Valle, formerly of Meta and NVIDIA, as Chief Scientist.