VoiceRun nabs $5.5M to build a voice agent factory

Nicholas Leonard and Derek Caneja wanted to build AI voice agents, but when they started building the product, they felt that many of these voice agents had design flaws.

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

“These two insights and a historic realization gave us the inspiration for VoiceRun,” said Leonard, the company’s CEO. Caneja is the company’s CTO.

Last year they decided to launch VoiceRun, a platform allowing developers and coding assistants to launch and scale voice agents. Right now, many of these low-code platforms let people build voice agents with visual diagrams, where people click through conversation streams and write prompts in boxes that then dictate how the agent should behave. All that can be difficult to manage, Leonard said.

VoiceRun, on the other hand, allows users to code how they want their voice agents to behave, giving them more flexibility in creating the product they want. Code is the native language of coding agents, Leonard explains. “They will do much better working in code than in a visual interface,” Leonard said.

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

“But in code it’s incredibly easy to do,” 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.”

In addition to coding agents, VoiceRun also allows users to A/B test and deploy instantly with one click.

The company focuses on business developers and, for example, helps companies integrate AI into their customer service or help technology companies launch voice-based products. For example, he mentioned working with a restaurant technology company that launched an AI phone concierge for food reservations.

The company on Wednesday announced the closing of a $5.5 million seed round led by Flybridge Capital.

There is a lot of competition in the field of AI agents. Startups in this space raised billions of dollars last year (out of the many billions that flowed into AI companies in general). Leonard feels like his company is dealing with two sides of the market: There are no-code voice builders like Bland and ReTell AI, he said, that allow users to build quick demos. There are also more advanced tools, such as LiveKt and Pipecat, that give developers “maximum control.” He feels that Voicerun is halfway between these two ends.

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

In a sense, Leonard hopes his product will help developers create voice agent tools that will, in turn, make people more comfortable with automated voices. Customers today feel “relief” when a human answers the phone, “because voice automation has been brittle and ineffective.”

A survey by Five9 last year it turned out that three-quarters of respondents in the survey still prefer to speak to a human when it comes to customer service. Leonard said he wants to change this perception because “human actors today have their own limitations,” such as language barriers or people feeling judged.

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