Simple AI Announces $14M from First Harmonic and Y Combinator to Build Voice AI Agents That Sell

Capital will fuel voice AI agent startup to help consumer brands automate phone calls

SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Simple AI, a voice AI agent platform, today announced that it has raised $14 million in a seed round led by First Harmonic, with participation from Y Combinator, Massive Tech Ventures, and True Ventures. The company will use the capital to invest in its voice agent platform, custom generative AI models, and an array of analytics and customer insights for businesses of all sizes.

Simple AI’s agents use state-of-the-art voice AI technology to automate inbound phone calls for sales and support. Their platform ingests their customers’ full product catalog, including SKUs, metadata, and pricing. On every call, the agent uses real-time customer data to personalize the interaction and take action on the customer’s behalf, such as placing an order. Each call also produces a complete transcript, summary, and actionable insights.

Latency is important for AI model response times, and it is especially critical for voice AI models. Simple AI’s technology keeps the latency under 850ms across the entire system, including voice activity detection, end-of-turn model, transcription, inference, and text-to-speech. This enables a natural conversation between a business’ agents and consumers.

“People hate calling businesses today because the experience is terrible,” said Catheryn Li, co-founder and CEO of Simple AI. “When voice agents are so good at their job that it becomes a delightful experience, everyone will prefer calling again. Phone calls will increase because voice is the most natural way to express yourself and interact with the world. Building voice agents that outperform human sales teams is a complex task, and I’m immensely proud of what our team has achieved.”

Simple AI’s technology addresses three common problems in contact centers: seasonality, worker ineffectiveness, and performance inconsistency. The tech scales up when a business has a spike, learns from the business’ best reps, and maintains consistency like no human can. Simple AI’s platform also offers experimentation tools to adjust each voice agent’s speed, gender, and accent, and allows businesses to customize each call with the customer’s item preferences, history with the business, and more.

“Imagine your top performing rep picking up every call,” said Zach Kamran, co-founder and CTO of Simple AI. “Simple agents know every detail about every product SKU, and all of your customer preferences in an instant.”

Simple AI’s voice agents already help businesses sell everything from steak to self storage to home insurance. They convert and upsell up to 30% more often than trained live reps. To learn more, visit usesimple.ai.

“Cat and Zach are among the best we work with,” said First Harmonic Partner JJ Fliegelman. “Without fanfare, they quietly built their own entire voice AI stack from the ground up so that they could have the best product. They’re both great engineers, low on ego, and customer-obsessed — exactly what you look for in great founders.”

About Simple AI

Founded by Catheryn Li and Zach Kamran, Simple AI builds voice AI agents for inbound and outbound B2C calls. Li and Kamran met while each running separate software teams at Y Combinator, where they had a front seat to the early research previews of LLMs as the nascent technology had not yet been applied to voice. Simple AI’s voice agent platform allows consumer brands to offer personalized calling experiences to every customer, starting with sales but expanding to the whole customer experience. The company has financial backing from First Harmonic, Y Combinator, Massive Tech Ventures, True Ventures, Conviction Embed, HNVR, and others.

Contacts

Simple AI
press@usesimple.ai