VoiceRun received $5.5 million to build a voice agent factory

Nicholas Leonard and Derek Kanega wanted to build AI-based voice agents, but when they went to build the product, they felt that many of these voice agents had design flaws.

Some of these agents were built using no-code tools, which meant shipping to production was fast, but product quality was often low. Other agents were manufactured by companies that had the time and resources to spend months building specialized tools. “Developers and companies needed an alternative,” Leonard told TechCrunch, adding that he and Kanega also realized that the future of software “will be coded, validated, and optimized by coding agents.”

“These two visions and historical awareness gave us the inspiration for VoiceRun,” said Leonard, the company’s CEO. Caneja is the CTO of the company.

Last year, they decided to launch it VoiceRun, platform It allows developers and code assistants to launch and scale voice agents. Currently, many of these low-code platforms allow people to build voice agents using visual blueprints, where people click on conversation flows and type prompts into boxes that then dictate how the agent behaves. All of this can be difficult to manage, Leonard said.

VoiceRun, on the other hand, allows users to code the way they want voice agents to behave, giving them more flexibility in creating the product they want. Leonard explained that code is the native language of programming agents. “They will do a much better job of handling code than they will with the visual interface,” Leonard said.

Furthermore, with visuals, there are limited configuration options, so, for example, if someone wants to create a voice agent that can speak in a different dialect, it can be difficult to do if the visual interface maker hasn’t built a feature that can handle that task.

“But in programming, it’s very simple to implement,” he said. “There’s a long tail of millions of examples of little things you might want to do that aren’t supported by the visual interface.”

Aside from programming agents, VoiceRun also allows users to perform A/B testing and deploy instantly with just one click.

The company is geared toward enterprise developers, helping companies, for example, integrate artificial intelligence into their customer services, or helping technology companies launch voice-based products. He mentioned, for example, working with a restaurant technology company to launch an AI-powered phone concierge service for food reservations.

On Wednesday, the company announced the closing of a $5.5 million seed funding round led by Flybridge Capital.

There is a lot of competition in the AI ​​agent space. Last year, startups in this field took in billions of dollars (among the many billions that have flowed into AI companies in general). Leonard feels his company faces two ends of the market: There are no-code audio creators, like Bland and ReTell AI, he says, that allow the user to create quick demos. There are also more advanced tools, such as LiveKt and Pipcat, which give developers “maximum control.” He feels Voicerun falls in the middle of those two extremes.

“We provide a global voice infrastructure and assessment-driven lifecycle, while keeping ownership of the business logic code and data in the hands of the customer,” he said. “The main difference is that we close the loop on end-to-end coding agent development. We expect developers to oversee the coding agents that write code, run tests, deploy, and suggest improvements.”

In some ways, Leonard hopes his product will help developers create voice agent tools that in turn help people feel more comfortable with automated voices. Customers today “feel comfortable” when a human answers the phone, “because voice automation was brittle and inefficient.”

Survey from Five9 Show last year Three-quarters of survey respondents still prefer to talk to a human when it comes to customer service matters. Leonard said he wanted to change that perception because “human factors today have their own limitations,” such as language barriers or making people feel judged.

“There were great cars before the Model T, but vehicles didn’t become ubiquitous until the assembly line,” Leonard said. “There are great voice agents today, but they won’t be everywhere until the voice agent factory is built. VoiceRun is that factory.”