Rime
Reviewed active Updated Jul 15, 2026This profile is AI-generated. If you spot an error, please help us fix it by sharing a URL to the correct information.
Founders
About
Rime is a San Francisco-based enterprise voice AI company that develops speech models trained on proprietary conversational data, announced on 2026-07-15 that it raised a $24 million Series A led by M13 Ventures, with participation from Twilio Ventures, Corazon Capital, Unusual Ventures, Cadenza Ventures, and existing investors 123. Founded by CEO Lily Clifford (former Stanford PhD student), Brooke Larson (ex-Amazon Alexa engineer), and Ares Geovanos (Stanford engineer), Rime uses a phoneme-based architecture that optimizes pronunciation of brand names and industry-specific terms, reducing customization needs for customers in food service, healthcare, airlines, and fintech 13. The company says it powers close to 100 million phone calls a month for customers such as Mayo Clinic, Dialpad, Upstart, and Asurion 23. The Series A follows a $5.5 million seed announced in May 2024 and brings total funding to approximately $29.5 million 2. As part of the round, M13 partner Morgan Blumberg joined the board and Rafael Valle (previously audio understanding lead at Meta Superintelligence Labs) joined as Chief Scientist 23.
Disclaimer: This is a lean profile built from initial round coverage and may be expanded as more information becomes available.
Funding History
| Date | Round | Amount | Lead | Co-investors |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024-05 | Seed | $5.5M | — | — 2 |
| 2026-07-15 | Series A | $24M | M13 Ventures | Twilio Ventures, Corazon Capital, Unusual Ventures, Cadenza Ventures 123 |
What Investors Say
“The design patterns that will define the speech-to-speech era of AI haven’t been built yet. 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.”
— Morgan Blumberg, Partner at M13, on the Rime Series A 3.
What Founders Say
“The voice technology is still not there to automate the vast majority of enterprise phone calls.”
— Lily Clifford, CEO of Rime, on the current limits of voice AI 1.
Sources
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Ivan Mehta, “Rime picks up $24M Series A to help enterprises field customer calls,” TechCrunch, July 15, 2026. Accessed July 2026. https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/15/rime-picks-up-24m-series-a-to-help-enterprises-field-customer-calls/↩↩↩↩
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“Rime Raises $24 Million Series A to Build the World’s First Enterprise-Ready Speech-to-Speech Model,” Yahoo Finance / AccessWire, July 15, 2026. Accessed July 2026. https://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/rime-raises-24-million-series-133000471.html↩↩↩↩↩↩
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“Rime Lands $24M Series A to Scale Voice AI,” VKTR, July 15, 2026. Accessed July 2026. https://www.vktr.com/customer-experience/rime-lands-24m-series-a-to-scale-voice-ai/↩↩↩↩↩↩