Guava raises $12.5M for voice AI agents on high-stakes calls

Guava raises $12.5M for voice AI agents on high-stakes calls

2 November 2026: Guava, a Los Angeles company building voice AI agents for regulated call centres, says it has raised $12.5 million, and Fintech Global reports that Acrew Capital led the seed round. Its first public model, Daytona, launched in September, and the company is now said to serve more than a dozen enterprise customers with tens of thousands of calls a day.

Not yet independently verified. Guava's own site confirms the $12.5 million, but its release would not load for us. Investors, use of funds and customer figures come from Fintech Global's report. We will update this when it can be confirmed, and remove this note.

Investors and what the money pays for

Fintech Global lists Flourish Ventures, WillowTree Ventures and Clocktower Ventures alongside Acrew, with existing pre-seed investor Commerce Ventures also returning.

The money goes on models, products and a go-to-market team selling to enterprises and business process outsourcers, according to the same report. Guava's site banner puts it simply: "Guava raises $12.5M to build voice AI for real calls".

Built on regulated call centre audio

The company's argument rests on where its models come from. It builds on voice models from Gridspace, trained on what it describes as 10 billion minutes of regulated call centre audio. Daytona is reported to rank in the top ten on the Coval word error rate benchmark, a measure of how accurately speech is turned into text.

Accuracy on noisy, real calls is what buyers in this market tend to care about most, because a misheard account number or date of birth has consequences that a misheard restaurant booking does not. Training data from actual call centres is a reasonable place to start, although a buyer should test on recordings of its own, with its own accents and its own line quality, before relying on a ranking.

The co-founders named are Omri Dahan, formerly chief revenue officer at Marqeta, along with Anthony Scodary, Nico Benitez and Mike Piechna.

A crowded field for regulated voice

Guava is entering a busy market. Contact centres have been offered voice agents from model makers, cloud providers and existing call centre software vendors, so a seed-stage company has to win on the parts larger suppliers treat as secondary. In a regulated setting those parts are consent to record, retention of transcripts, handing over to a person at the right moment, and evidence a compliance team can show to a regulator.

A prospective customer should ask for those in writing, along with who hosts the audio and whether it is used for further training. Since Guava sells to outsourcers as well as enterprises, a buyer could also meet its models through a supplier, which is worth asking about in any outsourcing renewal. Our call center software category lists six products.

The figures reported so far count calls rather than outcomes, so results from a named reference customer would be the next useful thing to see.

Company profile on TrustList: Guava

Related on TrustList:

• Five9 agrees to buy contact-centre AI firm Level AI for $325 million
• Flyle raises ¥1.88bn Series A for its AI contact centre agents

Sources

• Guava: company site banner linking its release of 2 November 2026 (read 7 November 2026), 7 November 2026
• Fintech Global: Guava secures $12.5m for high-stakes voice AI calls, 6 November 2026, 6 November 2026