San Francisco-based Rime has secured $24 million in Series A funding as it works to make enterprise phone interactions faster, more natural, and easier to deploy. The round was led by M13 Ventures, with participation from Twilio Ventures, Corazon Capital, Unusual Ventures, and other existing backers.
Founded in 2022 by Lily Clifford, Brooke Larson, and Ares Geovanos, the company is building voice AI models trained on conversational data it collects itself. Instead of depending on web-scraped audio, Rime operates a recording studio in San Francisco to capture cleaner and more controlled training material.
The startup says its models are designed to improve pronunciation of brand names and sector-specific terms, using a phoneme-based architecture that adapts to different speech patterns. That approach is meant to reduce the amount of customization enterprises need before deploying voice systems.
Rime is also shifting from a multi-model pipeline toward speech-to-speech systems. The goal is to lower latency, improve turn-taking, and make conversations feel more responsive, especially in environments where background noise and reliability matter.
The company already serves clients in food service, healthcare, airlines, and fintech, including Mayo Clinic, Dialpad, Upstart, and Asurion. With the new capital, Rime plans to expand its 35-person team across model development, engineering, and partnerships. It has also named Rafael Valle, formerly of Meta Superintelligence Labs and NVIDIA, as chief scientist.
As enterprise voice tools evolve, Rime's latest move reflects a broader push toward more adaptive, efficient, and industry-ready AI communication systems that could shape the next phase of customer engagement.
