VoiceRun raises $5.5M to challenge flawed voice AI market

A startup called VoiceRun has raised $5.5 million in funding to build what it describes as a better way to create voice agents for businesses. The round was led by investment firm FlyBridge. The company plans to use the money to expand its platform, which lets developers build voice agents that can handle customer service calls, restaurant reservations, travel bookings, and other tasks.

Background

VoiceRun was founded by Nicholas Leonard and Derek Caneja, who identified what they saw as a major gap in how voice agents get built. When they started working on voice AI themselves, they noticed two competing approaches, both with serious problems.

One approach relies on no-code tools that let non-technical people build agents quickly by clicking through conversation flows and typing prompts into boxes. These tools make it fast to get something working, but Leonard said the quality of the final product often suffers. The other approach requires companies to spend months building specialized tools from scratch, which only large organizations with significant resources can afford to do.

"Developers and enterprises needed an alternative," Leonard told reporters. "The future of software would be coded, validated, and optimized by coding agents."

Leonard serves as the company's chief executive officer, while Caneja is the chief technology officer. They launched VoiceRun last year with a different philosophy: let developers write actual code to build voice agents, rather than using visual diagrams or no-code interfaces.

Key Details

The VoiceRun platform works by letting developers use code to define how a voice agent should behave, then connect it to existing business systems and deploy it with a single command. The company provides the underlying infrastructure to handle phone calls, connect to different AI models, and manage the technical complexity that typically comes with voice applications.

One of the key features VoiceRun offers is the ability to test voice agents before they go live. The platform lets companies create dozens of automated test agents that stress-test their production agents for new releases. This approach is designed to catch problems that might otherwise slip through to customers.

The platform also includes tools for A/B testing, which lets companies run different versions of an agent to see which one performs better. Developers can see detailed traces of how calls went wrong and debug issues in minutes rather than days, according to the company.

How it works in practice

VoiceRun has already worked with a restaurant technology company to build an AI phone concierge that handles food reservations. The platform is also being used in banking, healthcare, travel, and logistics industries. In banking, voice agents can help customers check balances, freeze cards, and report disputes. In healthcare, agents can schedule appointments and verify insurance information.

The company offers flexibility in how businesses deploy the agents. Companies can use VoiceRun's own cloud infrastructure, which handles global phone numbers and manages the technical details. Alternatively, businesses can deploy agents on their own servers if they need more control over their data. The platform also works with web and mobile applications, not just phone calls.

What This Means

The funding signals investor confidence that there is real demand for a different approach to building voice agents. Leonard believes that better voice agents could change how people feel about calling businesses. Currently, most people still prefer talking to a human when they need customer service. A survey from Five9 showed that three-fourths of respondents prefer human agents.

Leonard said this preference exists because voice automation has been unreliable. When people do reach an automated system, it often fails to understand them or handle their needs. He argues that better voice agents could reduce customer frustration while also helping businesses save money on customer service costs.

The startup is positioning itself against existing platforms that use no-code or low-code approaches. Leonard said those platforms hit a wall when businesses need agents that can handle complex situations with multiple steps or lots of business logic. VoiceRun's code-first approach is designed to handle that complexity without forcing companies to build everything from scratch.

The company also sees opportunity in a future where AI coding agents write and improve code automatically. Leonard mentioned that VoiceRun is already thinking about how developers will supervise coding agents that write code, run tests, deploy updates, and suggest improvements. This represents a shift in how software development itself might work.

With the new funding, VoiceRun plans to expand its team and continue building out its platform. The company is betting that enterprises will choose its approach over simpler but limited no-code tools, and that better voice agents will eventually make customers feel more comfortable dealing with automated systems.