Giga, a San Francisco-based startup that builds voice-based AI agents for companies that need customer support, has raised $61 million in Series A funding led by Redpoint Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator and Nexus Venture Partners. The post-investment valuation of the company was not disclosed.
Founded by IIT Kharagpur graduates and Forbes 30 Under 30 alums Varun Vummadi and Esha Manideep, Giga is already working with food delivery company DoorDash. With the fresh funding, the company is looking to scale up usage within Fortune 100 enterprises and grow its team.
The voice AI space is crowded and competitive, mostly because of its potential to automate a lot of customer support work. The sector includes everything from specialized startups such as ElevenLabs and Vapi to tech giants like Amazon and Microsoft, vying for a share of a market projected to grow from $3.14 billion in 2024 to $47.5 billion by 2034.
Voice AI has the potential to streamline a lot of businesses’ customer service tasks, such as answering routine customer questions or scheduling appointments, without a human agent needing to step in. Many companies already use chatbots to automate various written communications with customers, but realistic voice AI that is good enough to hold natural conversations has the potential to handle many more customer interactions.
“It’s about giving time back. Even in chat or calls, people go through ridiculous flows. We want to simplify the process so issues get resolved easily and quickly,” Vummadi, one of Giga’s co-founders, told Fortune.
Vummadi sees Giga’s implementation speed as one of its main competitive advantages. He said the company can deploy enterprise-scale AI support in less than two weeks.
“We’re a very product-based based where companies can come and upload all the existing transcripts of their support agents and their policies, and we automatically build this into our system, so the time to value is dramatically low,” he said.
Another is Giga’s ability to perform multiple actions in real-time. The startup has built a unified real-time orchestration layer that manages all the different things the AI needs to do at once, such as listening, understanding what’s being said, deciding how to respond, checking databases, and speaking back. All tasks the system can do in less than half a second. For example, at DoorDash, if a Dasher can’t complete a delivery, Giga’s system can maintain a live connection with the Dasher, call the consumer to verify the address, and perform cross-check policy compliance all automatically and in real time.
“At DoorDash, we operate at a massive scale across services, platforms, and languages,” said DoorDash co-founder Andy Fang. “Giga leveraged usage data to deliver measurable improvements, including fewer escalations, faster resolution paths, and more efficient workflows across our teams. As we continue to grow across more than 40 countries and serve nearly 50 million people each month, partnerships like this are critical to delivering better outcomes for consumers on a global scale.”
Language and accent barriers
If successful, voice AI companies could help businesses reduce resolution times, cut escalations, and limit the need for large call center teams. However, experts have warned that automated voice AI has historically struggled with nuance and emotional intelligence, particularly when interacting with non-native speakers.
While voice AI systems are typically trained on vast datasets of speech, those datasets tend to skew heavily toward “standard” American or British English, meaning people with strong regional accents frequently find themselves being misunderstood. The problem is also particularly acute for elderly users or people with speech impediments, especially as these systems are increasingly being deployed in critical areas like healthcare and government services.
To combat some of these bias issues, Giga is working with open-source and multi-lingual LLMs and has developed a feature that lets customers opt into talking in a native language.
“We have seen a lot of accent issues go away if people speak in their native language. Multilingual is a very powerful asset,” Vummadi said. “We also store user preferences over time, so every interaction gets better.”
Expanding into finance and healthcare
Giga is planning to use some of the capital to fund an expansion into more regulated industries such as healthcare and finance. For these sectors, the company deploys its entire system on the client’s own cloud infrastructure using open-source models. Vummadi says Giga never has access to client data when deployed in this way.
In financial services, Giga is already live with several clients and is being used to automate compliance processes, such as flagging unusual transactions. When customers make transfers that deviate from their normal patterns, the AI can reach out to confirm the source and maintain the paper trail regulators require. “Those processes will be automated using AI, basically like a human reaching out,” Vummadi said, adding that the system can cross-reference details against external databases like Zillow to verify property sales to prevent fraud.
“What excites me most about Giga is that it’s not just building a best-in-class support bot,” said Satish Dharmaraj, Managing Director at Redpoint Ventures. “The team is building a foundational AI layer for customer voice — one that can understand nuance, reason about context, and scale with enterprise reliability.”
