companies
Rime
Voice AI company building text-to-speech models tuned for real, unscripted phone conversations rather than polished voiceover reads.
Rime was founded in San Francisco in 2022 by Lily Clifford, a Stanford NLP PhD dropout, alongside linguist and former Amazon Alexa engineer Brooke Larson and Stanford engineer Ares Geovanos. Rather than training on audiobook narration or voiceover reads, the founders built their own recording studio and collected what they describe as one of the largest proprietary datasets of full-duplex, spontaneous speech: conversations full of interruptions, hesitations, laughter, and the vocal disfluencies that scripted TTS training data usually edits out. The company's voice models now handle more than 100 million phone conversations a month for enterprise customers including Mayo Clinic, Dialpad, Upstart, and Asurion, spanning healthcare, fintech, and customer service. Rime offers cloud, VPC, and on-premises deployment with HIPAA and SOC 2 Type II compliance, and in 2026 hired Rafael Valle, previously of Meta Superintelligence Labs and Nvidia's audio research group, as chief scientist. Rime raised a $5.5 million seed round in 2025 led by Unusual Ventures, followed by a $24 million Series A in July 2026 led by M13 Ventures with participation from Twilio Ventures and Corazon Capital, bringing the team to roughly 35 people.
- Founded
- 2022
- Headquarters
- San Francisco, United States
- Sector
- lab
Tools
- Rime Mist
Rime Mist is an API-based text-to-speech model for real-time voice agents, customer calls, IVR systems, and other spoken applications.
- Rime Arcana
Rime Arcana is a text-to-speech model for real-time voice apps, generating expressive multilingual speech through Rime’s API.