Rime raises $24M, names chief scientist

Rime raised a $24 million Series A on July 15, led by M13 with Twilio Ventures, Corazon Capital, Unusual Ventures, and existing backers joining. The enterprise voice AI company builds real-time, humanlike speech-to-speech models that it says now carry nearly 100 million phone calls a month for clients including Mayo Clinic, Dialpad, Upstart, and Asurion. Founded in 2022 by Lily Clifford, Brooke Larson, and Ares Geovanos, Rime previously raised a $5.5 million seed in 2025.

With the round, Rime named Rafael Valle as chief scientist. He most recently ran audio work inside Meta’s Superintelligence Labs group, and before Meta he did applied deep learning research at NVIDIA. The funding is earmarked for model development, engineering, and its proprietary conversational dataset, and M13’s Morgan Blumberg is joining Rime’s board.

What it means for operators

Healthcare and financial-services callers do not forgive a voice agent that mispronounces a drug name or a talk-over on a hold line, which is presumably why Mayo Clinic and Upstart are already running production volume through Rime rather than a general-purpose model. Hiring a scientist straight out of Meta’s frontier audio team alongside the raise signals Rime wants to compete on model quality, not just price. If you are evaluating voice infrastructure, pair a vendor’s latency and accuracy claims with independent testing like Coval’s rather than a demo call, and compare the economics against xAI’s per-minute voice agent pricing before committing to a stack.