Vapi: The Infrastructure Play That's Already Running 1 Billion Calls
Vapi: The Infrastructure Play That's Already Running 1 Billion Calls
Company Overview
Vapi is a San Francisco-based voice AI platform that enables enterprises to build, deploy, and manage configurable voice agents at scale. The company raised a $50 million Series B on May 12, 2026, led by Peak XV, with participation from M12 (Microsoft’s Venture Fund), Kleiner Perkins, and Bessemer Venture Partners, bringing total funding to $72 million. The round valued the company at approximately $500 million.
Co-founders Jordan Dearsley and Nikhil Gupta met at the University of Waterloo and previously built a Y Combinator-backed calendar app that reached profitability. Dearsley started Vapi almost by accident. In mid-2023, he built a voice-based AI therapist for his daily walks, chaining models together and optimizing for latency until he had a working phone-based system. The therapy product didn’t take off, but the infrastructure did. Vapi launched publicly on Product Hunt in March 2024.
The team is small but battle-tested. The startup currently has around 100 employees. But here’s what matters: the company reports more than 1 million developers, over 2.7 million unique agents created, and over 1 billion calls made. That’s not hype. That’s proof of product-market fit.
The Market: Why Voice AI Is Becoming Non-Negotiable
The enterprise voice AI market is moving from “nice to have” to “competitive necessity” in real time.
The global enterprise voice AI agents market was valued at $6.8 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 29.5% from 2026 to 2034, reaching an estimated $62.4 billion by 2034. That’s a 9x market expansion over eight years. But there’s a more immediate signal: the market crossed $22 billion in 2026, enterprise adoption tripled, and Gartner says contact centers will save $80 billion this year from conversational AI alone.
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