Guava, a developer platform for building AI-powered voice agents, has raised $12.5 million in seed funding led by Acrew Capital. The round also included Flourish Ventures, WillowTree Ventures, Clocktower Ventures and existing investor Commerce Ventures.
The company will use the funding to advance its models and products and build a go-to-market team focused on enterprises and business process outsourcers (BPOs). The funding follows the launch of Guava’s first public model, Daytona, in September.
Daytona is already being used by more than a dozen enterprise customers and powers tens of thousands of calls each day, according to the company.
“It’s not every day you discover a frontier lab with a full team of top ML engineers in a market as big as voice,” said Omri Dahan, co-founder and CEO of Guava. “The team is extraordinary. Nearly every company we spoke with was dissatisfied with the voice AI they’d tried. It sounds fine in a demo but breaks down on real, high-stakes calls. We built Guava to give enterprises agents they can trust with high-volume, high-stakes conversations. Now we’re building the go-to-market team to take Guava to every enterprise and BPO ready to move voice AI from pilot to production.”
Guava Develops an Integrated Voice AI Platform
Guava aims to help businesses build voice agents that are reliable, scalable and easier for developers to control. Unlike systems assembled from tools provided by multiple vendors, Guava develops its own speech recognition, language models and speech synthesis as a single technology stack.
Its Daytona model has ranked in the top 10 on Coval’s word error rate benchmark, often placing first or second, the company said.
Guava’s software development kit (SDK) allows developers to integrate voice agents into applications using business rules and code. Developers can work with the platform through Python, TypeScript or Claude Code, while businesses control the agents’ purpose and connect their own knowledge bases.
“We’ve known Omri for years, so when he decided to step back into an operating role, we paid close attention,” said Lauren Kolodny, Founding Partner at Acrew Capital. “His co-founders have been building voice AI for over a decade, long before it was fashionable, and with a truly opinionated approach. This incredibly strong technical foundation, coupled with Omri’s ability to find market signal and scale real businesses, was a compelling opportunity.”
The company says developers can create a working agent in under five minutes using its free version. Enterprise customers typically make their first live regulated call within 14 days of kickoff.
Built on Voice AI Research
Guava’s technology builds on more than a decade of foundation model development by Gridspace, a voice AI research company whose models were trained on more than 10 billion minutes of live conversations in regulated call centers.
Guava was co-founded by Omri Dahan, Anthony Scodary, Nico Benitez and Mike Piechna. Dahan previously served as chief revenue officer at payments company Marqeta, while Scodary and Benitez were technical co-founders of Gridspace.
Based in Los Angeles, Guava develops voice agents for business applications such as appointment scheduling and customer support.
