Nicholas Leonard and Derek Caneja wanted to create AI voice agents, but when they went to build the product, they felt that many of these voice agents had design flaws.
Some of these agents were built with no-code tools, meaning that shipping to production was fast, but the product quality was often poor. Other agents were manufactured by companies that had the time and resources to spend months building specialized tools. “Developers and businesses needed an alternative,” Leonard told TechCrunch, adding that he and Caneja also realized that the future of software would be “coded, validated and optimized by coding agents.”
“These two ideas and a historical realization gave us the inspiration for VoiceRun,” said Leonard, the company’s CEO. Caneja is the company’s CTO.
Last year they decided to start VoiceRun, a platform which allows developers and coding assistants to launch and scale voice agents. Right now, many of these low-code platforms allow people to build voice agents with visual diagrams, where users click into conversation streams and write prompts in boxes that then dictate how the agent should behave. All of this can be difficult to manage, Leonard said.
VoiceRun, on the other hand, allows users to code how they want their voice agents to behave, giving them more flexibility in creating the product they want. Code is the native language of coding agents, Leonard explained. “They’ll do a much better job operating in code than in a visual interface,” Leonard said.
Additionally, with graphics, there are limited configuration options, so if someone wanted to create a voice agent that could speak a different dialect, it might be more difficult if the visual interface manufacturer hadn’t created a feature that could handle this task.
“But in code, it’s incredibly simple to do,” he said. “There’s a long queue of millions of examples of little things you might want to do that aren’t supported by the visual interface.”
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In addition to coding agents, VoiceRun also allows users to A/B test and deploy instantly with one click.
The company is geared toward entrepreneurial developers, helping companies, for example, integrate artificial intelligence into their customer services or helping tech companies launch voice-based products. He mentioned working with a restaurant technology company that launched an AI phone concierge for food reservations.
The company announced Wednesday the closing of a $5.5 million round led by Flybridge Capital.
There is a lot of competition in the AI agent space. Startups in this field last year took in billions of dollars (out of the many billions that poured into AI companies in general). Leonard believes his company faces two ends of the market: There are code-free voice generators like Bland and Retell AI, he said, that allow users to create quick demos. There are also more sophisticated tools, such as LiveKit and Pipecat, that give developers “maximum control”. VoiceRun feels like it sits in the middle of those two extremes.
“We provide global voice infrastructure and an assessment-driven lifecycle, while keeping ownership of business logic code and data in the hands of customers,” he said. “The key difference is that we close the loop for end-to-end coding agent deployment. We expect developers to oversee coding agents who write code, run tests, deploy, and recommend improvements.”
In a way, Leonard hopes his product helps developers create voice agent tools that, in turn, help people feel more comfortable with automated voices. Customers today “feel relief” when a human answers the phone, “because voice automation was fragile and ineffective.”
A survey by Five9 showed last year that three-quarters of respondents still prefer to speak to a human when it comes to customer service issues. Leonard said he wants to change that perception because “human agents today have their own limitations,” such as language barriers or making people feel judged.
“There were great cars before the Model T, but vehicles didn’t become ubiquitous until the assembly line,” Leonard said. “There are great voice agents today, but they won’t be ubiquitous until the voice agent factory is built. VoiceRun is that factory.”
