The Los Angeles-based startup plans to strengthen its voice AI models, expand enterprise adoption and develop technology for automated customer interactions.
Los Angeles-based artificial intelligence startup Guava has raised $12.5 million in a seed funding round led by Acrew Capital to expand its enterprise voice AI platform and accelerate product development. The investment will support the company's efforts to deploy AI-powered voice agents across businesses and business process outsourcing (BPO) providers.
The funding round also saw participation from Flourish Ventures, WillowTree Ventures and Clocktower Ventures, alongside existing pre-seed investor Commerce Ventures.
Guava plans to invest in developing its proprietary voice models, strengthening developer tools and expanding its enterprise sales operations. The company is targeting organisations that manage high volumes of customer interactions, particularly in industries where reliability, accuracy and operational controls are important.
Founded by Omri Dahan, Anthony Scodary and Nico Benitez, Guava builds voice AI technology designed to automate customer conversations and integrate with existing business workflows.
The company's first publicly available voice model, Daytona, was launched in September 2026. According to Guava, the platform currently serves more than a dozen enterprise customers and processes tens of thousands of calls daily.
Unlike voice AI platforms that depend on multiple third-party providers for speech recognition, language processing and voice generation, Guava develops and operates its own technology across these functions.
Its integrated system combines speech recognition, language models, speech synthesis and conversation management to process customer requests and generate responses during interactions.
The platform builds on voice AI research conducted by Gridspace, whose models were trained using more than 10 billion minutes of live conversations from regulated call centres.
Guava is also developing full-duplex voice technology, which would allow AI agents to listen and speak simultaneously, supporting more natural conversational interactions.
The company's software development kit enables businesses to integrate voice agents into applications using programming tools including Python and TypeScript. Developers can connect enterprise knowledge bases, establish operational rules and configure agents for specific business requirements.
According to the company, enterprise customers can typically begin handling live calls in regulated environments within 14 days of implementation.
The funding comes amid growing enterprise interest in automating customer service and telephone-based operations. According to Meticulous Research, the global voice AI agents market is projected to increase from $5.1 billion in 2026 to $43.8 billion by 2036.
Guava will also use the investment to support on-premises deployments and expand its commercial operations as businesses evaluate AI agents for customer support, financial services and other communication-intensive workflows.
The company has not disclosed its valuation following the funding round.
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