Voice AI startup Rime has raised $24 million in a Series A funding round to expand development of its enterprise speech models designed for customer support, sales and other business communications.
The round was led by M13 Ventures, with participation from Twilio Ventures, Corazon Capital, Unusual Ventures, and existing investors.
Founded in 2022 and headquartered in San Francisco, Rime develops voice AI models trained on proprietary conversational datasets collected through its own recording studio rather than relying on publicly available internet audio.
Focus on Enterprise Voice Applications
Rime said its technology is designed to improve pronunciation of brand names, technical terminology and industry-specific language using a phoneme-based architecture that reduces the need for customers to retrain models for specialized use cases.
The company was founded by Lily Clifford, Brooke Larson, and Ares Geovanos. Clifford was previously a Stanford PhD student, Larson worked on Amazon’s Alexa platform, and Geovanos studied engineering at Stanford.
According to the company, its customers operate across industries including healthcare, financial services, airlines and food service.
Rime said organizations including Mayo Clinic, Dialpad, Upstart, and Asurion use its voice AI technology.
Expanding Speech-to-Speech AI
The company initially built its platform using separate speech recognition, text-to-speech and large language models but is now shifting toward integrated speech-to-speech AI models.
According to Rime, the new approach is intended to reduce response latency, improve conversational turn-taking, better handle background noise and simplify model orchestration.
Chief Executive Officer Lily Clifford said enterprise voice AI still has room for improvement before it can fully replace traditional interactive voice response (IVR) systems.
“The voice technology is still not there to automate the vast majority of enterprise phone calls.”
Rime plans to use the new funding to expand its 35-person team, with hiring focused on AI model development, engineering and strategic partnerships. The company recently appointed Rafael Valle, formerly with Meta Superintelligence Labs and Nvidia, as its chief scientist.
Morgan Blumberg, a partner at M13, said the firm’s investment reflects confidence in Rime’s focus on developing enterprise-grade voice AI models with low latency and high reliability for regulated industries.