Voice artificial intelligence testing startup Coval Inc. revealed today that it has raised $28 million in new funding to expand its platform as more enterprises put voice agents into production.
Founded in 2024, Coval offers software that runs simulations, tracks live performance and labels data for AI voice and chat agents. Companies use it to test agents before launch and to monitor them afterward.
The case the company makes is that voice agents fail differently than ordinary software. They stumble over accents, background noise and dropped calls and they get tripped up by customers who do not say what a script expects. Many enterprises still check this work by hand, which Coval says does not scale.
Founder and Chief Executive Brooke Hopkins built evaluation infrastructure at Waymo LLC, Alphabet Inc.’s self-driving car unit, before starting the company. Coval frequently draws the comparison between the two. A voice agent runs several models at once to transcribe speech, work out a response and speak it back, which the company likens to the perception and planning systems in a self-driving car. In both cases, it says, simulation is the practical way to test at scale.
The platform runs probabilistic evaluations across millions of voice interactions. Customers use it to cut manual quality-assurance work by up to 30 times and deploy agents as much as 10 times faster. More than 60 organizations are now customers, the company said, among them Zoom Communications Inc. and voice AI infrastructure firm Deepgram Inc.
“Every company is going to have a voice agent just like they have a mobile app or a web app, but today, most enterprises don’t have the infrastructure to deploy these systems with confidence,” Hopkins said. “Coval gives teams the ability to simulate, monitor and continuously improve voice agents, so they can move from experimentation to reliable production at scale.”
Investor money has been flowing into voice AI. Coval points to figures showing more than $7 billion went into the sector in the first quarter of 2026 and a forecast that the market will pass $20 billion by 2031. Customer service, sales, financial services and healthcare are among the areas where enterprises are putting voice agents to work.
The new capital will be used to fund hiring on the company’s sales and solutions engineering teams and further product work, including deeper simulation, more integrations and added human review and monitoring tools.
The round was led by Norwest, with Base10 Partners, Twilio Ventures and Y Combinator also taking part. Scott Beechuk, a partner at Norwest, said Hopkins was well placed to define how companies deploy voice agents, citing her work on autonomous driving at Waymo.
The round brings Coval’s total funding to $31 million since its 2024 launch.
Support our mission to keep content open and free by engaging with theCUBE community. Join theCUBE’s Alumni Trust Network, where technology leaders connect, share intelligence and create opportunities.
About SiliconANGLE Media
SiliconANGLE Media is a recognized leader in digital media innovation, uniting breakthrough technology, strategic insights and real-time audience engagement. As the parent company of SiliconANGLE, theCUBE Network, theCUBE Research, CUBE365, theCUBE AI and theCUBE SuperStudios — with flagship locations in Silicon Valley and the New York Stock Exchange — SiliconANGLE Media operates at the intersection of media, technology and AI.
Founded by tech visionaries John Furrier and Dave Vellante, SiliconANGLE Media has built a dynamic ecosystem of industry-leading digital media brands that reach 15+ million elite tech professionals. Our new proprietary theCUBE AI Video Cloud is breaking ground in audience interaction, leveraging theCUBEai.com neural network to help technology companies make data-driven decisions and stay at the forefront of industry conversations.
此内容由惯性聚合(RSS阅读器)自动聚合整理，仅供阅读参考。 原文来自 — 版权归原作者所有。