Andreessen Horowitz recently made a thesis on real-time conversational voice AI and how it’s going to change the way we make phone calls!

Voice Agents have the potential to solve a lot of problems in the consumer as well as the business side. If you’re building an AI voice agent reach out to  [email protected] and [email protected].

This week on Minimum Viable, I’m featuring five startups that are already building AI Voice Agents across various B2B and B2C sectors.

Opencall AI

Opencall lets businesses answer the phone automatically. Their AIs answer questions, book appointments, and integrate with existing software. Businesses can get started with Opencall in less than an hour without any code

Opencall is backed by Y Combinator (W24) and was founded by Oliver Silverstein and Nicholas Lee. Oliver and Nicholas are both Z Fellows and both of them went to Northeastern University.

OpenCall has raised a total of $6M in pre-seed from Y Combinator and CoreNest

Vodex

Vodex is a GenAI-powered voicebot that calls your website visitors, qualifies your leads, and ensures you engage only with high-quality prospects, boosting your business efficiency and success.

Anshul Shrivastav (CEO) who has over 8+ years of experience at Mindtree had previously founded AxleWeb Technologies before starting Vodex with Kumar Saurav(CTO) who also had a startup of his own called Prescient Automation.

Vodex has raised a total of $2.3M in seed funding from Unicorn Ventures India, Pentathlon Ventures and 100XVC

Elsa

Elsa is an english language speech assistant which is designed to help you improve your english speaking communication skills by providing real-time feedback.

Elsa was founded by Vu Van after she left Vietnam to pursue an MBA and Masters in Education at Stanford University. Her professors and classmates could not always understand what she was saying, which led her to feel that her opinions in class were often dismissed.

Elsa has a total funding of $60M with it’s latest Series C funding of $23M in 2023. The round was led by UOB Venture Management,with participation from UniPresident and Aozora Bank, and from existing investors sych as Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI fund) and Monk’s Hill Ventures.

Kwal

Kwal is an AI that conducts interviews at warp speed and sounds just like a human wiith perfect recall and adaptive questioning.

Founded by David Tell and Kartik Padmanabhan who previously worked together at TaskHuman.

I could not find any funding information related to Kwal but the problem that they are solving looks interesting and I’d place a bet on them!

Ello

Ello is a read-along companion who listens, and teaches children into an enthusiastic reader. Ello listens to the child read out loud and analyzes their speech to correct mispronunciations and missed words.

Ello was founded in 2019 by Elizabeth Adams and Tom Sayer, the former head of impact and adoption programs at Google for Education. The third co-founder is engineer Catalin Voss, who was a PhD candidate in AI at Stanford University.

Ello, backed by Y Combinator (W20) raised a total of 15.5M as of now with their latest Series A in 2023 led by Goodwater Capital, Homebrew and Khosla Ventures.

pspsps 🐈️ … Read the entire thesis by a16z …