Rime Raises $24 Million Series A to Build Faster Voice AI Models
Updated
Updated · TechCrunch · Jul 15
Rime Raises $24 Million Series A to Build Faster Voice AI Models
1 articles · Updated · TechCrunch · Jul 15
Summary
$24 million in Series A funding will let San Francisco-based Rime expand beyond its 35-person team and speed development of enterprise voice AI, with M13 Ventures leading the round.
Rime is shifting from separate speech-to-text, text-to-speech and LLM systems toward speech-to-speech models to cut latency, improve turn-taking and handle background noise with less orchestration.
Its pitch in a crowded market is proprietary conversational data recorded in its own studio and phoneme-based tuning that helps enterprises avoid retraining models for brand names and industry terms.
Clients including Mayo Clinic, Dialpad, Upstart and Asurion have helped it win contracts in healthcare, airlines, food service and fintech, even as CEO Lily Clifford says voice AI still trails legacy IVR on most enterprise calls.
The round follows a $5.5 million seed raise last May, and Rime has added former Meta and NVIDIA audio researcher Rafael Valle as chief scientist while M13's Morgan Blumberg joins the board.