Guava Raises $12.5M in Seed Funding Led by Acrew Capital

Guava, a Los Angeles, CA-based provider of a platform for building voice agents, has raised $12.5 million in a seed funding round.

The round was led by Acrew Capital with participation from Flourish Ventures, WillowTree Ventures, Clocktower Ventures, and Commerce Ventures.

The company will use the funding to continue developing its AI models and products and build a go-to-market team focused on serving enterprises and business process outsourcing (BPO) companies.

What is Guava?

Guava develops technology that helps businesses build and deploy AI voice agents for customer conversations, appointment scheduling and live support.

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The company provides its own speech recognition, language models and speech synthesis technology in a single system. This allows it to manage the complete voice interaction, from understanding a caller's words to responding and completing the conversation.

Its developer software development kit (SDK) allows businesses to integrate voice agents into their applications using Python, TypeScript or Claude Code. Developers can set business rules and connect their own knowledge bases to control what the agents know and how they respond.

Guava's platform manages the voice interaction while allowing businesses to control the purpose and actions of their agents. The company aims to make voice AI easier to integrate and manage without requiring developers to become specialists in voice systems.

How Much Funding Has Guava Raised?

Guava has raised $12.5 million in its seed funding round. The company has not disclosed details of previous funding rounds or its total funding raised to date.

Who Invested in Guava’s Seed Round?

Acrew Capital led the $12.5 million seed funding round.

Other participating investors include:

• Flourish Ventures
• WillowTree Ventures
• Clocktower Ventures
• Commerce Ventures

Why the Funding Matters

Guava will use the funding to support further development of its voice AI models and products. It also plans to build a go-to-market team to serve enterprise customers and business process outsourcing companies.

The investment will help the company improve its platform as businesses look to use AI agents for real customer interactions and support operations.

Who founded Guava?

Guava was founded by Omri Dahan, Anthony Scodary, Nico Benitez and Mike Piechna. The company is based in Los Angeles, California.

Its technology builds on more than a decade of voice model development by Gridspace, a voice AI research company. Gridspace trained its models on more than 10 billion minutes of live conversations from regulated call centres.

“It’s not every day you discover a frontier lab with a full team of top ML engineers in a market as big as voice,” said Omri Dahan, co-founder and CEO of Guava. “The team is extraordinary. Nearly every company we spoke with was dissatisfied with the voice AI they’d tried. It sounds fine in a demo but breaks down on real, high-stakes calls. We built Guava to give enterprises agents they can trust with high-volume, high-stakes conversations.

Market and Business Growth

Guava launched its first public model, Daytona, in September. The model is already being used by more than a dozen enterprise customers and powers tens of thousands of calls each day.

Daytona has also ranked among the top 10 models on Coval's word error rate benchmark, frequently placing first or second.

The company is targeting the growing enterprise voice AI market. According to Meticulous Research, the global voice AI agents market is projected to increase from $5.1 billion in 2026 to $43.8 billion by 2036.

What Happens Next?

Guava plans to continue developing its voice models and platform while building its go-to-market team. The company will focus on expanding its enterprise customer base and serving business process outsourcing providers.

It also aims to make voice agents more reliable and easier for developers to integrate into business applications and customer service workflows.

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