Partner @ Sierra Ventures | Backing technical founders in AI & Cloud Infra | Investing Seed to Series A | Investor in Harness, Cohere, Isovalent, Opaque..
Transforming Voice: Market Map of 150+ Voice AI Companies We have now entered a new era. Voice AI agents are no longer research projects or demos - they’re deployed in production. Whether it’s buying or selling a house, scheduling a doctor’s appointment, or returning a purchase, there’s a chance you’ve already interacted with an AI voice agent without realizing it. What feels like a natural exchange requires sophisticated infrastructure: accurate speech recognition, context understanding, personalization, and the ability to handle interruptions or errors without sounding robotic. Customers can get turned off the moment they realize they are interacting with AI. Daniel, Tim, Anne and I looked at the voice AI market. This map contains some emerging startups solving several voice related pain points (link in comments). The future of voice AI agents is about creating companions that feel truly human. Within the next few years, voice AI will move closer to passing the Turing Test, blurring the line between human and machine conversation. These agents won’t just answer questions; they will understand context, adapt their tone, and respond with empathy, making every interaction feel natural and alive. ElevenLabs smallest.ai Cartesia AssemblyAI Deepgram Vapi Retell AI Bland Coval Ultravox.ai (formerly Fixie.ai) Sesame 11x Artisan Sierra Which ones did we miss? Please let us know. SIERRA Ventures #ai #voice #founders
Great list Ashish Kakran! I saw few of my portfolio in the list🙂
Great insights. Thanks Ashish Kakran for sharing this.
🙌 great map and post Ashish!
It's strange that there is no Voximplant in Voice Middleware , or to see Ultravox in TTS while they use external TTS providers... and it's just a few examples, I can easily find more
Maybe we get added too soon
Solid map, but the trust/consent piece feels like it’ll be just as important as the tech itself
Ashish Kakran great overview. As I wrote recently, building great Voice AI isn’t about clever prompts and an API mash-up. The moment callers hit “0” in frustration, you realize the difference between a demo and production. Every second of latency matters, and cobbling together cloud APIs just adds ms per hop until the experience breaks down. Telnyx solves this by owning the entire stack: licensed carrier in 60+ countries, private MPLS backbone, GPU clusters co-located at the edge, and an AI orchestration layer purpose-built for Voice AI. That vertical integration means ultra-low latency, full observability, and one SLA end-to-end. No vendor roulette, no 2AM outages from sub-vendors, and no re-writes just to scale globally. Price follows architecture: by eliminating middlemen and running on our own infra, customers see dramatically better unit economics compared to pieced-together solutions. That’s why large enterprises are running production-scale AI agents on Telnyx today, not just prototypes. If the goal is highlighting the platforms actually making Voice AI viable at scale, Telnyx has to be on the map. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-really-takes-build-great-ai-voice-agents-ian-reither-raktf
You simply cannot stop adding value can you Ashish Kakran
Partner @ Sierra Ventures | Backing technical founders in AI & Cloud Infra | Investing Seed to Series A | Investor in Harness, Cohere, Isovalent, Opaque..
6dThe Sierra Ventures blog and voice AI market map: https://www.sierraventures.com/content/voice-ai-market-map?hs_preview=EoecffXG-195142857528