companies

Bland AI

Enterprise platform for AI phone agents that place and receive calls at scale, built on Bland's own in-house voice models instead of third-party LLM and TTS providers.

Bland was founded in San Francisco in 2023 by Isaiah Granet and Sobhan Nejad, with an origin story the company still tells: Nejad's aunt couldn't get through to her insurance company by phone and was denied treatment as a result, which pushed the pair toward automating the calls businesses never pick up. Rather than assembling a voice agent from OpenAI, Deepgram, and ElevenLabs the way most competitors do, Bland built its own speech and language models end to end, and doesn't let customers swap in outside providers. The pitch is consistency and control: the same voice model handling a call in one region behaves the same way handling one elsewhere, without a third party changing behavior underneath the product. The platform now handles more than 3.5 million calls a week for customers including Samsara, Kin Insurance, and CNO Financial Group. Bland has raised over $100 million, including a $40 million Series B led by Emergence Capital and a $50 million Series C in 2026 led by Dell Technologies Capital, with participation from HubSpot Ventures and individual backers including Twilio founder Jeff Lawson.

Founded

2023

Headquarters

San Francisco, United States

Sector

applications