Amazon Ring has shifted all of its inbound customer-support calls to AI voice startup Vapi after testing more than 40 AI voice vendors during last year’s holiday season.
The deployment became a major milestone for Vapi and helped the company secure a $50 million Series B funding round led by Peak XV Partners at a valuation of roughly $500 million, according to reporting cited in the story.
Why Ring Chose Vapi
Ring began evaluating solutions in mid-Q4 2025 while facing a sharp increase in customer-support demand.
According to Jordan Dearsley, Ring considered three main approaches:
- expanding traditional call-center staffing,
- relying more heavily on automated phone menus,
- or deploying conversational AI voice agents.
Vapi says its platform won the contract because it gave Ring engineers detailed control over how AI agents behaved during real customer interactions.
Jason Mitura said Ring’s customer satisfaction scores improved after adopting the system and noted that non-engineering teams could adjust the AI experience without requiring developer intervention.
What Vapi Does
Vapi provides infrastructure that lets companies build and manage AI voice agents for tasks such as:
- customer support,
- appointment scheduling,
- outbound sales,
- and lead qualification.
The startup says it now processes between 1 million and 5 million calls daily and has handled more than 1 billion calls overall.
Enterprise customers include:
The company also says more than 1 million developers have used its self-serve platform.
From AI Therapist to Enterprise Voice Infrastructure
Vapi was founded by University of Waterloo classmates Jordan Dearsley and Nikhil Gupta.
The startup originally began as an AI therapist app Dearsley built in 2023 for conversational walks. After realizing the underlying low-latency voice infrastructure attracted stronger demand than the therapy product itself, the founders pivoted to enterprise voice AI and publicly launched Vapi in 2024.
The company previously went through Y Combinator with another startup called Superpowered.
Part of a Rapidly Growing AI Voice Market
Vapi is competing in a crowded but rapidly expanding AI voice ecosystem alongside companies including:
The broader trend reflects how enterprises are increasingly shifting customer-service operations toward AI-driven systems capable of handling natural conversations with minimal human involvement.
Vapi says its focus is less on building consumer-facing AI assistants and more on providing the infrastructure layer that enterprises can customize for reliability, compliance, and precise control over AI behavior.
The startup currently employs around 100 people and plans to use the new funding to expand engineering, infrastructure, and sales teams.
Featured image credits: DerbySoft
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