Voice AI platform Vapi now serves ~1B calls a year for Amazon, Uber and Intuit
ycombinator · x · 2026-09-25
On Y Combinator's Founder Firesides, Vapi co-founders Jordan Dearsley and Nikhil Routh talk with Gustaf about the long road to product-market fit.
- Vapi is a platform for building and deploying voice AI agents, now handling about a billion calls a year for companies including Amazon, Uber and Intuit.
- The founders pivoted more than a dozen times—from a calendar app and an AI note taker to an AI therapist that eventually became the foundation for Vapi.
- They explain why voice felt like the first inevitable idea, how conviction before the tech was ready paid off, and why model labs won't replace Vapi's layer.
- Key theme: voice is becoming the default interface between businesses and customers, but getting agents production-reliable is much harder than it looks.
Timestamps include: powering a billion calls (00:05), a dozen pivots (04:57), the AI therapist that became Vapi (14:14), why labs won't replace Vapi (22:47), and the future of voice AI (26:49).
Related event: Vapi founders recount the path to 1 billion AI calls a year(2 posts)→
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