As the industry explores how to make AI useful in the real world, Voice AI is standing out

While the AI industry continues to explore how to drive value and become embedded in the real world, it seems there are many hurdles still to overcome. Enterprise AI apps often struggle to scale, while the ongoing token reckoning has seen AI costs soar, placing the perceived value of the tech into question.  

Voice AI is one segment in particular that appears to buck the trend. Projected to reach $47.5 billion by 2034, the market is going through a period of massive growth, and startups from this segment are capturing this demand for user-focused voice AI tools.

According to Crunchbase, for instance, the top voice AI companies have seen their valuations triple in the past year which is a clear signal of a market with significant untapped potential and runway for growth. 

But why is the voice AI segment so immune to the pressures that other areas are facing, as they struggle to scale in the real world? 

To date, the broader industry has focused on funding massive, generalized foundational models. However, voice AI is driven by highly specialized vertical integration, which is key to realizing value.

This deep vertical integration is being complemented by adjacent technologies and strong consumer interest.

Consumers in general are already extremely familiar with using voice recognition software. Sending voice notes via WhatsApp, speech-to-text, or producing automated meeting transcripts are just some of the examples. A recent report from a16z on voice AI found that 60% of smartphone users utilized voice assistants regularly in 2024, up from 45% in 2023, highlighting the broad reliance on voice interfaces for everyday tasks. 

Yet the capabilities of previous AI models often struggled in the real world, producing suboptimal results. 

People naturally speak with different tones, pausing and adding common filler words that would trip up early speech recognition models. Meanwhile, regional accents and pronunciation differences could cause the AI to struggle to understand the phrases and the intent. 

Now, speech recognition is finally achieving human-level accuracy and LLMs have drastically improved their ability to understand intent, nuance and context. With the technology having overcome this technical hurdle, it opens up the doors to a huge number of use cases, from virtual receptionists to language tutors.  

While these early speech software tools helped to get us comfortable with voice interactions, the huge investments that frontier companies have made to improve general large language models are finally paying off.

As voice AI continues to garner attention, these seven leaders are helping to accelerate progress through fast-growing startups, capital funding strategy and media visibility. 

Anjli Jain, General Partner at ElevenX Capital

Anjli Jain serves as a General Partner at ElevenX Capital, where she directs investment strategy and manages investor relations.

Through ElevenX Capital, Jain is driving the uptick in voice AI adoption by backing startups that leverage the technology to build real-world consumer solutions, with a particular focus on the interaction of edtech and voice AI, backing startups that are transforming the student experience with virtual tools. 

In addition to her work backing the leading startups of today, she is a frequent commentator and author on the intersection of education, technology, and entrepreneurship and has been featured globally in platforms like EdTech Magazine, Entrepreneur and EdTech Digest. 

Gene Sigalov, Co-founder of Upfirst 

The impressive growth of the voice AI segment is thanks to the capabilities of the technology and its ability to address a real-world pain point in a seamless manner. Here, Upfirst is an example of a startup that embodies this trend. 

Upfirst is helping small business owners and service companies to capture new leads and avoid leaving any customer call unanswered thanks to its virtual receptionist tools that work in a variety of languages, accents, and styles. Not only can technology answer incoming calls, but also complete follow-up tasks like scheduling an appointment and adding it to the customer and business calendar. 

Gene Sigalov is the co-founder of Upfirst. The licensed attorney is also a serial entrepreneur, previously the founder of SimpleTexting, which acquired over 17,000 users and was sold to Sinch. 

According to company data, virtual receptions powered with voice AI have helped small business owners capture up to 30% more calls. The switch to a virtual receptionist has helped these companies recoup value from calls that were previously going unanswered, showing the immediate ROI of the technology. 

Ivan Mehta, Reporter at TechCrunch

Ivan Mehta is known for his work covering global consumer tech developments at TechCrunch with particular focus on consumer tech, hardware, AI platforms, and voice AI. 

He is an active member of the tech community, moderating panels and keynote interviews at tech conferences, covering topics from enterprise AI to consumer hardware, and from the future of work to startup ecosystems. 

Through his ongoing coverage of consumer tech, he has been a leading advocate for voice AI, recognizing its potential as a driving force for the wider AI industry.

As such, he has made a significant contribution to raising the visibility of voice AI as a valuable segment through his independent newsletter, Week in Voice AI. 

Here, Ivan Mehta covers the full spectrum from model development, enterprise deployment, and customer experience and gives readers the latest funding trends, news about the biggest companies in voice AI, through to technical subjects like token processing for the AI voice stack. 

Ivan Crewkov, CEO at Buddy.ai

Ivan Crewkov is Co-founder and CEO at Buddy.ai, using voice AI to bring personalized English language tuition to young learners around the world. 

As an AI tutoring pioneer, Ivan helped to spearhead the field of avatar‑based AI tutoring in 2019 before even ChatGPT was on the scene. Since then, Buddy became the first AI tutor and AI avatar to reach millions of users, dramatically improving educational access and quality for children.

In developing Buddy’s voice-first approach, he drew on over 12 years of experience building voice‑first products, including speaker and voice‑assistant technology for smart homes. 

This early exposure to the importance of voice AI as a user interface for technology set the foundation for Buddy.ai, which is now tutoring children worldwide.

Ajit Singh, Chief Operating Officer at QuickLaunch 

Ajit Singh has over 22 years in higher education IT, working at Ellucian and founding Oculus IT. During this time, he saw firsthand the importance of using service to bridge a gap in the market, but it’s only the right product that will close it. 

As of April 2026, he was named the Chief Operating Officer at QuickLaunch, an AI-powered identity and integration platform purpose-built for Higher Education.

Now, Ajit brings this operational depth and a practitioner’s perspective to QuickLaunch’s rapidly expanding customer base, using voice AI to protect higher education institutions from fraud and other threats by automatically verifying students and staff during login as a robust form of two-factor authentication.

The solution also uses voice AI to support students who need to reset their password, easing the pressure on admin teams. 

Arun Chopra, CEO of Unifyed 

Arun Chopra has over 40 years of experience in finance, higher education and information technology. 

As the CEO of Unifyed, he is bringing voice AI to the student experience to transform enrollment and engagement throughout the education lifecycle.

Here, Unifyed offers students instant answers, personalized guidance, and timely recommendations through an intelligent AI assistant they can chat with using voice commands to provide a seamless user experience.