Isaiah Granet spent three weeks at Y Combinator getting turned down by 180 investors. Their reason was always the same: phone calls would not exist in a year. He has now raised more than $100mn to prove them wrong.
His startup, Bland, has closed a $50mn Series C led by Dell Technologies Capital, Fortune reported. HubSpot Ventures, Archerman and Tribeca joined, along with existing backers including Emergence Capital, Upfront Ventures, Scale Venture Partners and Y Combinator.
The angel list is a who’s who of the field: Affirm’s Max Levchin, Twilio founder Jeff Lawson, and Piotr Dabkowski, the chief technology officer of voice-AI giant ElevenLabs.
Owning the model
Most voice AI tools wrap around someone else’s model. Bland does the opposite. The platform runs only on its own in-house voice models, and it will not let customers plug in OpenAI or Anthropic, even if they ask.
