I’m thrilled to announce that Voiceops has raised $5 million in seed funding co-led by Bonfire Ventures and Twelve Below, with participation from Precursor Ventures, Not Boring Capital, Village Global, Kearny Jackson, Mana Ventures, and Four Acres Capital. The round also includes notable angel investor Varsha Rao (former Airbnb executive and Founder of Zeal AI). This milestone fuels our mission to help businesses learn from every customer interaction and turn those insights into action—faster and smarter than ever before.
Why Voiceops Exists
B2C companies have millions of customer interactions every day — rich, messy, beautiful data that holds the blueprint for how they can grow and innovate. Yet most businesses are stuck seeing just the tip of the iceberg. Why do some reps crush it while others flounder? Why do some leads fizzle out (bad fit or poor follow-through?)? Which customers are a churn risk?
Voiceops answers those questions. Our AI platform digs into calls, uncovers “aha” moments, and delivers answers to the right people at the right time.
In other words, we help businesses make every conversation count.
The result? Companies learn faster, adapt quicker, and win bigger—for their customers, their employees, and their bottom line.
My Unexpected Journey Here
I’ve spent basically my whole adult life becoming the expert in B2C customer conversations. This surprised me. 15 years ago I would have predicted I’d be in politics or nonprofits. But gradually and then suddenly, this became my thing. In my one and only job after college, which lasted a whopping 4 months before startup fever forever took hold of me, I saw sales managers sitting beside reps, fishing for bits of insight from calls. It was a real slog. A genuine business problem hiding in plain sight.
At the same time, I knew AI was on the rise. I had built my first AI model in a computer science class in college in 2013, and transcription technology was starting to take off (shoutout to AssemblyAI who’s a great partner of ours and at the frontier of this). When I moved to San Francisco in 2016, I was right in the center of the early AI buzz, hanging around the folks who’d end up being early employees at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google Deepmind, and had Sam Altman as our YC partner.
Take 1: A mattress in the kitchen, and a lot of lessons
In 2016 when I launched my first business in this space, I spent the first 4 months sleeping on a mattress on the floor in somebody’s kitchen. I remember waking up to my drunk roommates cooking chicken at 3am, practically next to my bed. (I do not hold this against them - sometimes you just need a bit of late-night frozen chicken!). I was up for anything if it meant being able to put my full attention towards launching a startup.
This was 6 years before ChatGPT would launch. We worked very hard, got funded by Accel and Bain, but without GenAI, it was a hard nut to crack. We spun up a 1000-person data labeling team in the Philippines, which while impressive in one sense, also made it very difficult to move quickly, stay scrappy, and maintain workable margins. It was an invaluable experience: I got a 5-year education on how B2C businesses operate, and how to build a company that serves them extraordinarily well.
Now with GenAI, almost a decade of amassing expertise, an incredible partner in my VP of Engineering Viji Vennelekanti, and some amazing early customers, we’ve built something very special.
Take 2: Turning calls into a company’s playbook
Today, Voiceops is using GenAI to transform how B2C businesses operate. Our platform turns their calls into a playbook for the whole company, so that they can:
- Replicate their best reps by finding and scaling the tactics that are working across the floor.
- Nail messaging by seeing real-world customer reactions, and identifying the words and themes that resonate.
- Spot competitive threats early by seeing in real-time new rivals or product gaps, direct from the mouths of customers.
- Perfect their offerings by understanding what their buyers want, why they buy, don’t buy, and more.
- Reduce risk and non-compliance by flagging compliance violations and brand missteps instantly.
- Prevent churn by highlighting where there’s churn risk and intervening early.
After nearly a decade in this space, I've seen the same story over and over again with conversation intelligence software: months-long implementations that leave you stuck with expensive tools, an unchanged QA team, and, still, limited visibility.
Voiceops breaks this cycle. We deliver value in minutes, not months, with AI that reviews calls with both the accuracy and good judgment of your best human experts. You'll feel the relief of truly understanding every conversation—and increasingly, you can relax as our system brings insights to the right people at the right time.
How? We've spent three years perfecting this. Our B2C-specific AI models, built on top of the bleeding-edge models from the big labs, learn by observing your reps, customers, and managers, absorbing your unique expertise while you simply do your job. As your team interacts with it, the AI continuously learns and improves. Most importantly, our system doesn't trap insights in dashboard purgatory—it takes direct action (like our Synthesis feature) by pushing intelligence into workflows where it drives real business improvement.
All of this is backed by five core tenets that guide our product:
- Set Up in Days – No endless implementation or complex configuration
- Data You Can Trust – Our AI combines each company’s own expertise with the latest AI frontier, and keeps learning and improving every day.
- Instant Insights – Every insight updates with each new customer interaction, so you’re always working off the most up to date information about your business.
- Simple for Users – Designed for minimal training and maximum adoption
- On the AI Frontier – Always using the most advanced models while preserving your unique know-how.
In short: better intelligence, faster & simpler deployments, and a direct path to impact.
Where We’re Going
With this funding, we’re doubling down on our mission to make every conversation count. The era of hunches is over—Voiceops is here to help you listen at scale, learn instantly, and adapt overnight.
We’re hiring
Towards this vision, we are hiring engineers anywhere in the U.S., as well as sales and marketing folks in NYC where we just opened an office by Union Square.
We believe that the outcome of this company will be determined largely by the quality and execution of this early team. I spend 50% of my time hiring right now. We tend to look for folks who have demonstrated long tenures at previous jobs, high achievement in those jobs (promotions, clobbering quotas, etc), and who can move in hours and days, not weeks and months. If that is you, and you want to be part of an early fast-growing startup, please email me at ethan@voiceops.com and my right arm Jenn Smith at jenn@voiceops.com
A Nod to Our Early Customers
Just as we help others learn from their customers, we’ve learned immensely from our own. Early adopters like Ben Chapman at ISSA have helped us refine this into something special. Our ambitions have grown as our customers have pointed the way. Our customers are the lighthouse as we sail in the dark night, pointing to all the incredible and beautiful ways to make use of customer interaction data — data which nearly every major business in the U.S. economy possesses and underutilizes.
Join us
The potential to transform businesses through customer insights has never been greater. In 5 years we will marvel at how much guesswork used to dominate strategic decisions. If you’re ready to see what Voiceops can do for your team—or want to help us build the future—visit voiceops.com or reach out. Let’s make every conversation count.
