Voice AI startup Rime raises $24 million Series A

Rime has raised $24 million in a Series A funding round led by M13 Ventures, with Twilio Ventures, Corazon Capital, Unusual Ventures and other existing investors also participating. The startup plans to use the funding to expand its team of 35 employees, hiring across model development, engineering and partnerships.

Founded in 2022 by Lily Clifford, Brooke Larson and Ares Geovanos, Rime trains its voice AI models on conversational data it records in its own studio, rather than scraping audio from the web, aiming to reduce the customization load its enterprise clients would otherwise carry. That approach has helped it win contracts with customers including Mayo Clinic and Dialpad, alongside clients in food service, healthcare, airlines and fintech.

Clifford argues that voice technology is still not there to automate the vast majority of enterprise phone calls, despite the ease large language models have brought to building voice applications. “The voice technology is still not there to automate the vast majority of enterprise phone calls. LLMs have made it a lot easier to build voice applications that work, but they haven’t changed how it feels to interact. Talking with a voice AI agent is not the most compelling experience for the end user. It’s kinda like a new IVR, but with a better voice,” she said, referring to Interactive Voice Response, the legacy automated telephony systems that voice AI is meant to replace. In response, Rime is shifting its focus toward speech-to-speech models — systems that process spoken input directly into spoken output without an intermediate text step — to cut latency, improve turn-taking and handle background noise more effectively, while reducing its dependence on managing separate models stitched together through orchestration.

M13 partner Morgan Blumberg, who is joining Rime’s board as part of the round, pointed to how the competitive landscape is shifting: companies like ElevenLabs have moved into orchestration and the application layer, competing directly with customer-support specialists such as Sierra and Decagon, alongside infrastructure players like Vapi, Retell, LiveKit and Deepgram. Blumberg said Rime’s focus on pushing model performance with low latency and reliability in regulated settings stood out against that backdrop.

The round follows a $5.5 million seed round Rime raised last May. The company recently hired Rafael Valle as Chief Scientist to drive its model work forward.

Why it matters

Rime is betting that owning its training data, rather than assembling models from scraped audio and stitched-together pipelines, gives it an edge in a voice AI market where ElevenLabs, Deepgram, Decagon and Sierra are all competing for the same enterprise phone-call business. The $24 million round gives it runway to test that bet as it moves from a multi-model pipeline toward speech-to-speech systems.