building voice AI agents for sales @simpleailab (yc s24). prev @ycombinator @instagram @mit
sf bay area ☀️
Joined September 2014
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Excited to announce that @simpleailab has raised a $14M seed round led by @firstharmonic.
For the past year, we’ve been building AI voice agents to transform direct-to-consumer sales. We fundamentally believe that voice AI is the future of all B2C calls.
At Simple, we work hard to give our customers (and their customers!) the most natural, seamless voice AI on the market. We’re now the only agents on the market to use audio-based sentiment to understand how a person is feeling. This means that rather than trying to gauge sentiment from a text transcript, Simple’s agents process straight from audio.
Our newest conversational awareness model, Tango, picks up on cues like frustration, confusion, and happiness throughout every call. Here’s what that looks like in practice: 💃🏻
An AI agent can answer every question correctly and still feel completely tone-deaf.
Today, we're introducing Sentiment in Tango, Simple's conversational awareness model. It makes Simple the first voice agent on the market to process sentiment directly from audio.
For more: usesimple.ai/blog/tango-sent…
So proud of the team for this launch. Timing is a huge problem for voice AI and our customers are already seeing the impact of using our industry-leading EOT model.
Voice AI's biggest challenge is timing. Today we’re excited to introduce Tango, Simple's conversational awareness model.
Tango is industry-leading on LiveKit's public end-of-turn benchmark, catching 96% of turn endings, responding in ~800ms, and barging in 5% of the time.
For more: usesimple.ai/blog/tango-voic…
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The world needs far more software than it can build. Cognition exists to change that.
We’ve just raised over $2B at a $48B valuation, led by a16z, Accel, Founders Fund, General Catalyst, and Avenir.
Since our round in May, run-rate revenue has grown from $492 M to almost $900 M.
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Hello Vegas! We’re in town this week and we bring gifts. 👀 🎁
The Simple Wishline is live! Look out for our trucks on the Strip. Whether you're here for Genesys Xperience, or just enjoying the summer. When you spot one, simply call the number and tell Wendy the Wishline Agent your gift.
We’re granting wishes all week. Some asked for tickets to the Sphere. Some, that fancy buffet. What do you wish for?
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Today, we're introducing idler – a frontier data research lab.
We've raised a $9M seed round, led by @0xalpo and @FrankieIsLost from @paradigm, with participation from @ycombinator, @LongJourneyVC, and angels including @marrc, @catheryn_li, @dcposch, @JanineLeger, @LynettCapital, @feross, and @nur_daulet_.
This funding helps us build the evals, benchmarks, and reinforcement learning environments that the world's leading frontier labs use to train and measure their models.
gong cha not even good 🤮
Bain Capital to buy Taiwan-originated Gong Cha chain for over $635m s.nikkei.com/4hylAKD
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Eight days from contract sign to AI taking live customer calls. And that was only the beginning.
A year into the deployment at Omaha Steaks:
- 60% of all calls are completely handled by AI, 70%+ on sales
- Call abandonment down from 16% to 3%
- Seasonal hiring plans cut from 5,000 to 692
- 36% higher upsell rates than the seasonal hires it replaced
At Customer Contact Week Las Vegas, our CEO @catheryn_li sat down with Grant Young and Rob Bradshaw of Omaha Steaks to walk through the whole story, including the details vendor case studies usually skip: the phone tree assumption that turned out to be wrong, the broken add-to-cart button that Simple flagged in the middle of peak season, and what happened to the QA team after the AI started helping.
The full 45-minute conversation is now on YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=ZCmXLwly…
In Chinese we have a saying, 画蛇添足. It means adding feet to your drawing of a snake (doing more work to make things worse).
Someone had to decide to write code to add this validation. cc @zapmail_ai
I, too, did not have the vision
Every year is another opportunity to have a generational bag fumble 😮💨 congrats to the @cursor_ai team!
I hate this new trend of salespeople cold sending me videos on Linkedin DM. You have maybe 2 seconds of my attention. I can scan a message, but I can't click and watch your video in 2 seconds.
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Today, @MichaelElabd, @QuantumArjun, and I are excited to announce Trajectory.
We are a research lab and product company building the platform for Continual Learning.
Our platform unlocks the signal already sitting in product usage, so companies can continuously post-train large-scale agentic models that outperform the frontier. @trajectorylabs
We’ve raised $15M from @Conviction, @BessemerVP, @radicalvcfund, @jeffdean, @drfeifei and more.
We’re partnering with some of the best AI-native companies: @ClayRunHQ @Harvey, @DecagonAI, @mercor, @RogoAI to power their agentic systems, some of which we are already in production with.
We’ve brought together a world class research team from DeepMind, OpenAI, Apple, Meta Superintelligence, Amazon AGI, Scale AI, and an elite product team from Stripe and Figma.
AI will never again start on day one. Every correction, every retry, every edit will make products smarter. This is Continual Learning.