All posts tagged: Peak XV Partners

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 …

As AI data centers hit power limits, Peak XV backs Indian startup C2i to fix the bottleneck

As AI data centers hit power limits, Peak XV backs Indian startup C2i to fix the bottleneck

Published by skeptic

Power, rather than compute, is fast becoming the limiting factor in scaling AI data centers. That shift has prompted Peak XV Partners to back C2i Semiconductors, an Indian startup building plug-and-play, system-level power solutions designed to cut energy losses and improve the economics of large-scale AI infrastructure. C2i (which stands for control conversion and intelligence) has raised $15 million in a Series A round led by Peak XV Partners, with participation from Yali Deeptech and TDK Ventures, bringing the two-year-old startup’s total funding to $19 million. The investment comes as data-center energy demand accelerates worldwide. Electricity consumption from data centers is projected to nearly triple by 2035, per a December 2025 report from BloombergNEF, while Goldman Sachs Research estimates data-center power demand could surge 175% by 2030 from 2023 levels — the equivalent of adding another top-10 power-consuming country. Much of that strain comes not from generating electricity but from converting it efficiently inside data centers, where high-voltage power must be stepped down thousands of times before it reaches GPUs. This process currently wastes about …