Founded in 2022 by Lily Clifford, Brooke Larson, and Ares Geovanos, Rime develops voice AI models tuned for enterprise phone calls. The company operates a recording studio in San Francisco to collect conversational data rather than relying on web-scraped audio and employs a phoneme-based architecture to adapt pronunciations and brand-specific terms. Rime started with separate pipelines for speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and an LLM but is shifting focus toward speech-to-speech models to reduce latency, improve turn-taking, and handle background noise. It serves customers across food service, healthcare, airlines, and fintech and counts Mayo Clinic, Dialpad, Upstart, and Asurion among its enterprise clients. The startup has about 35 employees and recently hired Rafael Valle as Chief Scientist to strengthen its audio understanding and model work. Rime says its training approach helps increase customer call duration, which it credits with winning enterprise contracts.

Total raised

$30M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Series A

Latest activity

Jul 2026