AI

Bland raises $50M to automate complex, high-stakes phone calls

Voice artificial intelligence startup Bland today revealed that it has raised $50 million in new funding to expand its research, grow its engineering team and scale its platform into more regulated industries.

Founded in 2023, Bland builds AI agents that handle phone calls, SMS and chat. Where much of the market wraps third-party foundation models around short, scripted tasks such as appointment reminders and call routing, Bland runs on voice models it built itself. Customers cannot swap in models from other providers.

The bet is on calls that other systems choke on. A typical Bland call runs 30 to 45 minutes. In a healthcare example, an agent walks an elderly patient through a blood pressure reading, reads back the numbers and works out whether to call in emergency services. The company says it now handles upward of 3.5 million calls a week in healthcare, financial services and other regulated sectors. Last year it processed more than 175 million.

“Most voice AI systems are built for simple interactions,” Chief Executive Isaiah said. “We are focused on the calls that are hardest to automate. The ones that are long, nonlinear and where things can go wrong at any point.”

Owning the models lets Bland tune for the messy parts of a live call, such as latency, interruptions and ambiguity. The sales pitch follows from that. Rather than shaving off a slice of call volume, a customer can hand over whole categories of conversation.

Bland claims more than 250 enterprise customers, among them Samsara Inc., Kin Insurance Inc. and CNO Financial Group Inc. Granet told Fortune that 180 investors passed on the company during its Y Combinator days, many of them convinced phone calls were on the way out.

Dell Technologies Capital Inc. led the Series C round. HubSpot Ventures, Archerman Capital and Tribeca Venture Partners joined, as did returning backers Emergence Capital Partners LP, Upfront Ventures, Scale Venture Partners LP and Y Combinator. Affirm Holdings Inc. co-founder Max Levchin, ElevenLabs Ltd. Chief Technology Officer Piotr Dąbkowski and Twilio Inc. founder Jeff Lawson also participated.

“Voice is one of the hardest problems in AI and Bland is one of the few companies tackling it at the level required for real-world deployment,” said Elana Lian, a partner at Dell Technologies Capital. “Their decision to build models in-house and focus on complex, high-stakes interactions has positioned them ahead of the market.”

The new round takes the total raised by Bland to more than $100 million.

Image: Bland