Conversational AI startup Vocode has raised $3.25 million in seed funding.
The San Francisco-based startup has built an open source LLM library for developers to create voice applications. Founded in 2023 by Ajay Raj and his partner Kian Hooshmand, Vocode raised funding at Y Combinator without a formal pitch.
The founders of Vocode were friends from high school who joined Y Combinator despite their opposition to pitching their original business plan. He had 10 weeks until Demo Day, so the team started interviewing teams in fintech, healthcare, and climate change to find ideas before landing on conversational AI.
Notably, the company is behind PrankGPT, a service that allows users to make prank calls by entering a prompt and a phone number.
After a run-in with police following a prank call to 911, the founders learned “a valuable lesson about not posting online without guardrails,” Houshmand told Business Insider in an interview.
“Building conversational AI turned out to be a very difficult technical challenge, and there were no developer tools available. Use cases that combine language models and speech have a lot of expressive power. there is.”
In addition to knowing when a person has finished speaking, constructing the relatively intangibles of human voice-speech interaction, such as tone, semantic context, and backchanneling through body language, is a challenge. was. Delays are also a major technical issue, Houshmand added.
The company started making waves in the online hacker community before its Demo Day pitch session in front of investors. Around that time, Vocode began raising money before closing the round in the weeks following the event.
Vocode's funding comes from Y Combinator, Base10, GV, Gradient, Accel, and Liquid2. “YC is valuable in that it helps provide a seal of legitimacy that attracts other investors. We have been fortunate to attract a lot of inbound interest,” Fouchmand said. Told.
The startup's new funding will be used to hire a team that will grow to about 10 staff as it continues to integrate with US technology companies.
Vocode's YC Demo Day slides can be viewed below.
