Enterprise voice AI company Rime has raised $24 million in Series A funding to expand its conversational AI platform, strengthen its proprietary speech datasets, and accelerate AI research. Alongside the investment, the company has appointed former Meta audio research leader Rafael Valle as Chief Science Officer to drive innovation in enterprise voice AI.
Quick Intel
Rime Secures Series A Funding to Expand Enterprise Voice AI
Rime has announced a $24 million Series A funding round led by M13, with participation from Twilio Ventures, Corazon Capital, Unusual Ventures, and existing investors. The investment will help the company expand its proprietary conversational speech datasets, strengthen engineering and research teams, and scale the infrastructure supporting its enterprise voice AI platform.
As part of the investment, Morgan Blumberg, Partner at M13, will join Rime's Board of Directors, reinforcing the company's next phase of growth.
Rime also announced the appointment of Rafael Valle as Chief Science Officer. Previously leading audio research at Meta's Super Intelligence Lab, Valle will oversee research initiatives aimed at advancing the company's conversational AI capabilities and product innovation.
Building AI Around Human Conversation
Founded by Lily Clifford, Brooke Larson, and Ares Geovanis, Rime approaches voice AI through a linguistics-first methodology that combines speech science with one of the world's largest collections of expressive multilingual conversational speech.
Rather than focusing solely on larger AI models, the company aims to improve conversational quality through linguistic design, helping enterprise AI systems deliver more natural, context-aware voice interactions.
"The things that matter most in conversation are the hardest to pin down. Response relevance is hard to specify; speech appropriateness is hard to verify. There's no unit test for sounding like you care," said Lily Clifford, co-founder and CEO of Rime. "That's exactly why this is a design problem, not just an engineering one. We're building voice interaction models, systems where our linguistic judgment and taste become research instruments, not afterthoughts. With this new funding and Rafael Valle joining as Chief Science Officer, we're 10x-ing our data investment to define the design language of conversational general intelligence.”
Enterprise Adoption Continues to Grow
Rime currently powers nearly 100 million phone calls each month for organizations including Mayo Clinic, Dialpad, Upstart, and Asurion. The company has gained traction in highly regulated sectors such as healthcare and financial services, where pronunciation accuracy, compliance, and conversational reliability are critical.
According to the company, an independent evaluation by Miravoice covering 100,000 calls found that Rime's voice models achieved statistically lower "Hung Up During Intro" (HUDI) rates than competing providers while also delivering the fastest median call completion times. These results demonstrate how conversational quality can directly influence customer engagement and business outcomes.
“In financial services, the stakes for voice AI are exceptionally high and accuracy is a requirement for customer trust,” said Shiv Indap, Upstart. “Rime’s ability to handle complex financial use cases with precision allows us to build experiences that truly serve our customer’s needs.”
"The design patterns that will define the speech-to-speech era of AI haven't been built yet. Rime is doing the foundational work by combining frontier AI with deep linguistic expertise to create the speech infrastructure the next generation of AI products will rely on,” said Morgan Blumberg, Partner at M13. “Lily, Ares and Brooke are building Rime with the rare combination of world-class AI research and deep linguistic expertise to deploy real time voice people can trust in complex, regulated environments."
The latest funding and leadership expansion position Rime to further invest in conversational AI research while supporting enterprise demand for reliable, scalable voice AI across regulated industries.
ABOUT RIME
Rime is the trusted enterprise voice AI platform, built on a linguistics-first foundation to deliver the world’s leading conversational speech models. Founded in 2022 by academic speech scientists and Stanford engineers, Rime powers over 100 million monthly interactions for leaders in healthcare, finance, and customer experience. The company is backed by M13, Twilio Ventures, Corazon Capital and Unusual Ventures.
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