Guava Lands $12.5 Million to Tackle Voice AI’s Real-world Growing Pains
Acrew leads seed round as former Marqeta revenue chief teams up with voice AI veterans to offer a full-stack platform
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Guava, a new developer platform for building voice agents, today announced $12.5 million in seed financing led by Acrew Capital, with participation from Flourish Ventures, WillowTree Ventures, Clocktower Ventures, and Guava pre-seed investor Commerce Ventures. The fresh capital will support continued model and product development and kick-start Guava’s go-to-market team serving enterprises and business process outsourcers.
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Guava announces $12.5M seed round led by Acrew Capital, with Flourish Ventures, WillowTree Ventures, Clocktower Ventures and Commerce Ventures.
Guava’s first public model, Daytona, launched in September. Daytona is already supporting over a dozen enterprise customers, powering tens of thousands of calls per day.
The global voice AI agents market is projected to grow from $5.1 billion in 2026 to $43.8 billion by 2036, according to Meticulous Research. As enterprises move voice agents into real-world customer interactions, Guava is betting that the next challenge will be building systems that are reliable, scalable and easier for developers to control.
Guava is built on over a decade of foundation model development by Gridspace, a frontier voice lab that trained its models on over 10 billion minutes of live conversations in regulated call centers.
“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,” said Omri Dahan, co-founder and CEO of Guava. “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.”
Dahan joined Guava after serving for over a decade as chief revenue officer at Marqeta, where he helped scale the payments company from its first dollar of revenue until its public-market filing. A previous investor in Gridspace, Dahan co-founded Guava with Gridspace’s technical co-founders, Anthony Scodary and Nico Benitez, taking the best of the lab’s voice AI research and building a focused commercial company around it.
“We’ve known Omri for years, so when he decided to step back into an operating role, we paid close attention,” said Lauren Kolodny, Founding Partner at Acrew Capital. “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.”
Most voice agents today are stitched together from components provided by different vendors and controlled largely through prompts. Guava takes a different approach on both counts.
On the model side, Guava builds and runs its own speech recognition, language models, and speech synthesis as a single stack, so it controls the voice experience from the first word a caller says to the last. Guava’s Daytona model has ranked in the top 10 on Coval’s word error rate benchmark, often in first or second place.
On the control side, Guava’s SDK is designed to help developers integrate voice directly into their apps via business rules and code, rather than forcing them to become experts in managing voice agents and prompts. Developers add Guava to their own products and workflows through Python, TypeScript, or Claude Code. Guava takes full accountability for the quality and effectiveness of the voice experience. End to end, Guava listens, speaks and manages the conversation to completion. The customer controls the intent and connects the knowledge bases that decide what the agent knows and does.
Developers can sign up for a free version and have a working agent in under 5 minutes, while enterprise customers typically take their first live regulated call within 14 days of kickoff.
“When you stitch together other people’s models, you inherit their latency, their failure modes and their release schedules,” said Anthony Scodary, Co-founder and Co-Head of Engineering at Guava. “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.”
“For voice AI to scale, businesses need code-level control and consistency, along with flexibility in how and where it’s deployed,” said Emmalyn Shaw, Co-founder and Managing Partner of Flourish Ventures. “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.”
About Guava
Guava helps developers build AI voice agents for customer conversations and tasks like scheduling appointments and live support. Its platform manages the voice interaction while letting businesses control what agents know and do using their own software and business rules. Based in Los Angeles, Guava serves enterprises and business process outsourcers. Guava was co-founded by Omri Dahan, Anthony Scodary, Nico Benitez, and Mike Piechna. Learn more at goguava.ai.
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