Amazon Ring selected AI voice startup Vapi over more than 40 competitors to handle its customer support calls during last year's holiday season. The deployment, which now covers 100% of Ring's inbound phone traffic, helped Vapi secure a $50 million Series B funding round led by Peak XV Partners, pushing the company's valuation to approximately $500 million, according to a source with knowledge of the deal. Ring approached Vapi in mid-Q4 after evaluating whether to expand traditional call-center capacity, rely on standard automated phone systems, or deploy AI agents capable of more natural customer interactions. Vapi CEO Jordan Dearsley said Ring chose the startup because it offered engineers granular control over how AI agents behaved during live customer conversations. Jason Mitura, Ring's vice president of software development, noted that customer satisfaction scores improved after deploying Vapi's platform and that teams could tune the AI agent experience without depending on engineering support. "A lot of AI tools promise great outcomes — Vapi has delivered on them," Mitura said. Vapi was founded by Dearsley and his University of Waterloo classmate Nikhil Gupta. The pair had previously gone through Y Combinator with a productivity startup called Superpowered before pivoting to Vapi. The company originated from an AI therapist Dearsley built in 2023 for conversations during his daily walks. While few users wanted the therapy product itself, enterprise startups increasingly expressed interest in the low-latency voice infrastructure underlying it, leading to the pivot and public launch in 2024. Vapi now provides tools for companies to build, deploy, and manage voice agents across customer support, lead qualification, appointment scheduling, and outbound sales. The startup reports handling more than 1 billion calls through its platform, with daily volume currently ranging between 1 million and 5 million calls. Beyond Amazon Ring, Vapi's enterprise customers include Kavak, Instawork, New York Life, UnityAI, Cherry, and Intuit.