Rime picks up $24M Series A to help enterprises field customer calls

In a significant move for the voice AI industry, Rime, a startup based in San Francisco, has successfully raised $24 million in a Series A funding round led by M13 Ventures. The company is set to enhance the way enterprises manage customer interactions, particularly in sales, marketing, and support. Founded in 2022 by a trio of innovators — former Stanford PhD student Lily Clifford, ex-Amazon Alexa engineer Brooke Larson, and engineer Ares Geovanos — Rime aims to carve out its niche in a competitive landscape. The startup has developed proprietary voice AI models trained on unique conversational data collected through its own recording studio, rather than relying on publicly scraped audio. Rime is focused on refining its voice models to accurately pronounce brand names and industry-specific terminology. By employing a phoneme-based architecture, it enables clients to avoid extensive retraining of models tailored to their sectors. Despite advancements in voice AI technology, Clifford acknowledges that many enterprises still rely on traditional Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems due to the current limitations of AI in replicating the effectiveness of these systems. The startup initially set out with various models for speech-to-text and text-to-speech applications but is now pivoting towards developing superior speech-to-speech models. This shift aims to minimize latency, enhance conversational turn-taking, and address challenges like background noise, streamlining the technology stack. Rime's client portfolio spans multiple industries, including food service, healthcare, airlines, and fintech. The company asserts that its training data leads to longer call durations, which has helped secure contracts with notable organizations such as Mayo Clinic, Dialpad, Upstart, and Asurion. With the new funding, Rime plans to expand its team of 35, with new hires focusing on model development, engineering, and partnerships. Recently, Rafael Valle, who contributed to audio understanding at Meta Superintelligence Labs and NVIDIA, joined as Chief Scientist. Morgan Blumberg from M13 Ventures expressed confidence in Rime's strategic approach, emphasizing the need for low-latency, high-reliability models tailored to regulated environments. Previously, Rime had raised $5.5 million in a seed funding round last May.