Isaiah Granet was rejected by 180 investors in three weeks during Y Combinator. Their reason: phone calls won’t exist in a year. He’s raised more than $100 million to prove them wrong.
Bland, the San Francisco voice AI company Granet co-founded in 2023 with Sobhan Nejad, closed a $50 million Series C led by Dell Technologies Capital, Fortune learned exclusively. HubSpot Ventures, Archerman, and Tribeca joined the round; existing backers Emergence Capital, Upfront Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, Y Combinator, Affirm co-founder Max Levchin, ElevenLabs CTO Piotr Dąbkowski, and Twilio founder Jeff Lawson also participated.
The company raised a $16 million Series A in August 2024 and a $40 million Series B led by Emergence in January 2025. New capital will go toward expanding research, growing the engineering team, and scaling into more regulated industries.
Bland’s origin story is personal: Nejad’s aunt, unable to get through to her insurance company by phone, was denied access to medical treatment. The two founders—both engineers—set out to build a phone agent that could stay on the line long enough to actually fix the problem.
Many voice AI tools today wrap around third-party models and handle short, scripted calls: appointment reminders, basic routing, password resets. Bland’s platform runs exclusively on its own proprietary, in-house-built voice models, and won’t let customers integrate models from OpenAI or Anthropic into the tech—even if they wanted to.
