Rime, a voice AI startup based in San Francisco, has raised $24 million in a Series A funding round to strengthen its enterprise customer call solutions. The funding was led by M13 Ventures, with participation from Twilio Ventures, Corazon Capital, Unusual Ventures, and other existing investors. The company aims to expand its team of 35 people and focus on model development, engineering, and partnerships. Rime is also planning to bring on Rafael Valle as its Chief Scientist, who previously worked on audio understanding at Meta Superintelligence Labs and NVIDIA’s applied deep learning audio research team.
Rime’s voice AI models are trained on conversational data it records in-house, rather than relying on web-sourced audio. The startup said it focuses on tuning its voice models to handle the pronunciation of brand entities and industry-specific terms using a phoneme-based architecture. This approach allows customers to avoid retraining models for their specific industry. Rime has customers in food service, healthcare, airlines, and fintech, with enterprise contracts from clients like Mayo Clinic, Dialpad, Upstart, and Asurion.
Founded in 2022 by former Stanford PhD student Lily Clifford, ex-Amazon Alexa engineer Brooke Larson, and Stanford engineer Ares Geovanos, Rime has built a recording studio in San Francisco to collect its own conversational data. Clifford noted that despite progress in voice AI, enterprises still prefer legacy IVR implementations due to AI voice technology not yet matching IVR’s effectiveness. She described the current voice AI experience as similar to a new IVR but with a better voice.
Source: techcrunch
