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Funding secured. Rime raised $24M Series A led by M13 Ventures.
Voice AI focus. Company builds real-time humanlike voice models for enterprises.
Enterprise shift. CIOs may see voice-driven interfaces reshape user workflows.
Rime on July 15 said it raised $24 million in a Series A funding round led by M13 Ventures. Twilio Ventures, Corazon Capital, Unusual Ventures and Cadenza Ventures also participated. The San Francisco-based company previously raised $5.5 million in a seed round in May 2025.
The funding will go toward building voice interaction models for enterprise conversational AI, according to company officials. Morgan Blumberg, partner at M13, joined Rime's board as part of the round.
Rime also announced Rafael Valle as chief scientist. Valle previously led audio understanding at Meta Superintelligence Labs and worked on NVIDIA's Applied Deep Learning Research audio team.
"The design patterns that will define the speech-to-speech era of AI haven't been built yet," Morgan Blumberg, Partner, M13. "Rime is doing the foundational work by combining frontier AI with deep linguistic expertise to create the speech infrastructure the next generation of AI products will rely on. Lily, Ares and Brooke are building Rime with the rare combination of world-class AI research and deep linguistic expertise to deploy real time voice people can trust in complex, regulated environments."
Strategic Focus Areas for Rime
The Series A aims to advance Rime's voice infrastructure across several dimensions.
Capability | Description |
|---|---|
Voice interaction models | Conversational AI models for enterprise voice applications |
In-house data collection | San Francisco recording studio for proprietary conversational data |
Linguistic expertise | AI research combined with deep linguistic knowledge for natural speech |
Enterprise deployment | Fortune 500 voice applications in regulated industries |
Scientific leadership | Ex-Meta audio lead Rafael Valle joining as chief scientist |
Recent Rime News
Rime spent the past year pushing upmarket into healthcare and regulated industries, gaining enterprise credibility through a partnership with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure that the company said delivered roughly 3x price-performance gains on healthcare workloads such as appointment scheduling and revenue-cycle management. Independent validation came at the AAPOR 2026 conference, where Miravoice research comparing 12 voices across Rime, ElevenLabs and Google over nearly 100,000 automated calls found Rime voices produced the highest caller retention. A Goodcall case study documenting sub-100ms voice latency and a three-tier pricing model further signaled a shift from sales-led to product-led growth.
In early 2026, Rime moved to expand distribution through hyperscaler-adjacent channels, striking a deal to natively host its models on Together AI for end-to-end voice-pipeline latency under 700ms, opening access to Together's healthcare, financial services and government customer base. A separate partnership with SLNG targeted low-latency voice AI delivery across underserved global markets.
On the product side, Rime released Mist v3 in April — a production TTS engine with roughly 40ms p90 time-to-first-byte and deterministic pronunciation control for brand names and medical terminology — followed six weeks later by Coda, a dual-decoder flagship model shipping with more than 600 voices across 50-plus languages. The Coda launch positions Rime to compete more directly with ElevenLabs and hyperscaler voice offerings in the agentic telephony market.
Voice AI in Enterprise Contact Centers
Enterprise contact centers are deploying voice intelligence at scale, chasing measurable cost savings in a market projected to grow 192% to $49.8 billion by 2031.
As VKTR reported, every call exposes choices about latency tolerance, data sovereignty, cloud versus on-device processing and audio quality under network strain. Real-time API integration with CRMs, contact center as a service (CCaaS) platforms and workforce management systems amplifies the business value of voice deployments.
Companies using AI in contact centers report 20–30% reductions in operational costs, according to CMSWire reporting.
Rime Background
Rime develops enterprise voice AI for product and engineering leaders in telecom, healthcare, financial services and large restaurant brands. Founded in 2022 by former Stanford PhD student Lily Clifford, ex-Amazon Alexa engineer Brooke Larson and Stanford engineer Ares Geovanos, the company focuses on high-volume, compliance-driven voice deployments.
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Rime offers three text-to-speech models: Coda for balanced quality and speed, Arcana for expressive multilingual voices and Mist for real-time, low-latency applications. The platform supports cloud and on-premises deployments, with SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA compliance.
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