Rime raises $24M Series A for AI that helps handle customer calls

In short: Rime raised $24 million to build AI that helps big companies handle customer phone calls.

What happened

San Francisco based Rime said it raised $24 million in a Series A funding round led by M13 Ventures. Twilio Ventures, Corazon Capital, Unusual Ventures, and other existing investors also joined.

Rime makes voice AI, which is software that can talk and listen on the phone. The company says it is already handling over 100 million calls each month across multiple companies, in areas like food service, healthcare, airlines, and fintech.

Rime says it tries to make its system easier for companies to use by collecting its own conversation recordings in a San Francisco studio. It also focuses on getting names and industry terms pronounced correctly. It uses a phoneme based approach, meaning it breaks speech into small sound units, like sounding out a word, so it can handle different pronunciations without customers having to do as much extra training.

Rime said it is shifting toward “speech to speech” models, which aim to listen and respond more directly. The goal is to reduce delays, improve back and forth timing (like not talking over you), and work better with background noise.

With the new funding, Rime plans to grow beyond its current team of 35. It recently hired Rafael Valle as chief scientist, after work on audio research at Meta and NVIDIA.

Why it matters

Many people already feel frustrated by automated phone systems, like the “press 1 for billing” menus known as IVR (an automated call routing system). Rime’s CEO Lily Clifford told TechCrunch that AI phone agents still often feel like a newer version of IVR, even if the voice sounds better. This funding shows companies are still betting on improvements, but it also suggests the experience may not change overnight.

Source: TechCrunch AI