Guava, a Los Angeles-based developer platform for artificial intelligence voice agents, has raised $12.5m in seed funding as it looks to bring more reliable automated conversations to regulated industries, including insurance.
Acrew Capital led the round, with participation from Flourish Ventures, WillowTree Ventures, Clocktower Ventures and existing pre-seed investor Commerce Ventures. The company will use the capital to advance its models and products and build a go-to-market team targeting enterprises and business process outsourcers (BPOs).
The funding comes as insurers and other regulated businesses explore how voice AI could support customer interactions. From policy enquiries and customer support to claims-related conversations, automated voice agents could help organisations manage growing call volumes. However, deploying the technology in real-world settings presents challenges around reliability, response times and the ability to handle complex conversations.
Guava is positioning its platform around these issues, arguing that voice AI systems can perform well in demonstrations but struggle when exposed to high-volume, high-stakes customer calls. Its technology is designed to give businesses greater control over how agents behave, while managing the underlying voice interaction.
The company launched its first public model, Daytona, in September. More than a dozen enterprise customers are already using the model, which processes tens of thousands of calls each day. Daytona has also ranked in the top 10 on Coval’s word error rate benchmark, frequently placing first or second.
Guava’s technology builds on more than a decade of foundation model development by Gridspace, a voice research lab whose models were trained on more than 10 billion minutes of live conversations from regulated call centres.
The company was co-founded by Omri Dahan, former chief revenue officer at payments firm Marqeta, alongside Gridspace technical co-founders Anthony Scodary and Nico Benitez, and Mike Piechna. Dahan spent more than a decade at Marqeta, helping the business scale from its first revenue to its public-market filing.
Rather than combining speech recognition, language models and speech synthesis from multiple providers, Guava develops and operates its own models within a single technology stack. The company says this gives it greater control over the full customer conversation, from the caller’s first words through to the completion of an interaction.
Its software development kit allows developers to integrate voice agents into existing applications and workflows using Python, TypeScript or Claude Code. Businesses can define the agent’s objectives, connect their own knowledge bases and establish the rules governing what the technology can do.
This approach could be relevant to insurers looking to introduce automated customer interactions without losing control over how information is handled or how conversations are resolved. Guava says developers can create a working agent in under five minutes using its free offering, while enterprise customers typically reach their first live regulated call within 14 days of starting implementation.
The new funding will also support development of voice AI for edge devices, on-premises installations and full-duplex interactions, allowing agents to listen and speak simultaneously. These capabilities are intended to improve the flexibility and responsiveness of voice systems across different business environments.
Guava co-founder and CEO Omri Dahan said, “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. 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.”
Acrew Capital founding partner Lauren Kolodny said, “We’ve known Omri for years, so when he decided to step back into an operating role, we paid close attention. 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.”
Guava co-founder and co-head of engineering Anthony Scodary said, “When you stitch together other people’s models, you inherit their latency, their failure modes and their release schedules. We train and serve every model ourselves, so we can tune the whole pipeline around one goal: a conversation that feels natural and finishes the job. This funding lets us advance our state-of-the-art models into edge device applications, on-prem installations, and full-duplex interaction, where the agent can listen and speak at the same time the way people do.”
Flourish Ventures co-founder and managing partner Emmalyn Shaw said, “For voice AI to scale, businesses need code-level control and consistency, along with flexibility in how and where it’s deployed. Guava gives developers that control while delivering leading performance across key industry benchmarks. We believe this combination can supercharge voice agents as a primary interface between customers and businesses, across highly regulated industries as well as everyday use cases.”
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