UK voice AI startup SLNG says the voice labs that have dominated the market have been systematically overcharging enterprises — and that the industry is heading for a price correction.
"The market has been shaped by voice labs whose business model depends on maximising compute at every step of every call," says Luke Miller, SLNG's CEO. "Every syllable through the most expensive TTS, every pause analysed by a full LLM call, every transcription through the highest-cost engine. We want to reprice the entire voice agent market."
SLNG, which raised €3.3M in pre-seed funding from Earlybird, StepFunction and a16z scouts in late 2025, is building what Miller calls "the Vercel for voice agents" — an execution layer that sits between a team's existing voice agent orchestrator and the underlying AI models. Teams bring their agent — built on LiveKit, Pipecat, or whichever framework they've chosen — plug into SLNG, and the platform handles model selection, in-region routing, failover and compliance across 11 sovereign regions.
Miller was previously a venture partner at Earlybird VC and the first seller at Vercel, where he built the company's international business.
The execution layer — a new category for voice agents
