All posts tagged: Kleiner Perkins

AI voice startup Vapi hits 0M valuation after winning Amazon Ring over 40 rivals

AI voice startup Vapi hits $500M valuation after winning Amazon Ring over 40 rivals

Published by skeptic

Amazon Ring, facing a surge in customer-support calls during last year’s holiday season, evaluated more than 40 AI voice vendors before choosing startup Vapi to handle its inbound phone traffic. Today, Ring routes 100% of its inbound calls through Vapi’s platform. That deployment helped Vapi raise a $50 million Series B led by Peak XV Partners at a valuation of around $500 million after investment, according to a person familiar with the matter. Ring turned to Vapi in mid-Q4 last year, when it was weighing whether to expand call-center capacity, rely more heavily on traditional automated phone systems, or deploy AI agents that could respond more naturally to customers, Vapi Chief Executive Jordan Dearsley (pictured above, left) told TechCrunch. Dearsley believes Ring chose Vapi because if offered Ring engineers granular control over how the AI agents behaved in live customer interactions. Jason Mitura, vice president of software development at Amazon Ring, said Ring’s customer satisfaction scores improved after deploying Vapi’s platform and that the company’s teams were able to tune the AI agent experience without …

With .5B in fresh capital, Kleiner Perkins is going all in on AI

With $3.5B in fresh capital, Kleiner Perkins is going all in on AI

Published by skeptic

Kleiner Perkins, the prominent U.S. venture firm, announced on Tuesday that it raised $3.5 billion in fresh capital across two funds, a significant increase from the firm’s $2 billion fundraise less than two years ago. The firm, founded back in 1972, says it raised $1 billion for its 22nd early-stage venture fund, and $2.5 billion for a separate vehicle designed to fund late-stage growth businesses. The much larger capital haul is not a surprise. Over the last few years, Kleiner Perkins has managed to secure early stakes in a number of fast-growing AI startups, including Together AI, Harvey, and OpenEvidence. The firm is also an investor in Anthropic and SpaceX, two companies expected to IPO this year. At a time when exits are few and far between, Kleiner Perkins also realized significant returns from last year’s IPO of Figma, a design software company whose $25 million Series B round it led in 2018. The firm also reportedly scored a decent return when its portfolio company Windsurf was acqui-hired by Google last summer.    A firm …

Emil Michael, now a senior Pentagon official, says he’ll never forgive Uber investors who ousted him and Kalanick

Emil Michael, now a senior Pentagon official, says he’ll never forgive Uber investors who ousted him and Kalanick

Published by skeptic

Emil Michael, who serves as a senior technology official at the Department of Defense, is back in the spotlight over the government’s ongoing battle with Anthropic, and a newly released podcast interview offers one of the most detailed looks yet into his thinking on that dispute — as well as an unguarded settling of old scores from his Uber days. The interview, released Monday and conducted last month by Joubin Mirzadegan, a partner at Kleiner Perkins who leads the venture firm’s portfolio operating team, covered a range of topics including policy and personal history — and was recorded before the DoD’s feud with Anthropic had fully come to a head. But it is Michael’s remarks about his departure from Uber — and his barely concealed bitterness about it — that grabbed our attention first. When Mirzadegan asked him point-blank whether he had been shown the door alongside Travis Kalanick, Michael answered with a single word: “Effectively.” Michael resigned eight days before Kalanick did in June of 2017, as part of the fallout from a workplace …