Conversational AI platform Bland.com has announced a $40 million Series B funding round led by Emergence Capital. Bland AI was founded in 2023 by WashU alum Isaiah Granet (AB ‘22) and Sobhan Nejad. The pair saw the frustrations and inefficiencies inherent in traditional call centers and set out to revolutionize enterprise communication through hyper-realistic phone agents designed to sound just like a human.
Bland’s innovative approach has attracted significant attention from investors; the startup went from Pre-seed to Series B in just 10 months. They announced a $16 million Series A funding round led by Scale Venture Partners this past August – the round included participation from Y Combinator and angel investors Max Levchin (founder of PayPay) and Jeff Lawson (founder of Twilio). The Series B round brings Bland’s total raise to $65 million, which will help the company scale operations, enhance its AI capabilities, and expand its market research. Heading Bland’s GTM team is fellow WashU alum Noah Kravitz (LA ‘22).
Check out the press release below to learn more about how Bland.com is using hyper-realistic AI agents to change automated phone calls forever.
SAN FRANCISCO, CA, January 9th, 2025 – Bland.com the platform automating phone calls for the enterprise using hyper-realistic AI agents, is thrilled to announce their $40M Series B led by Emergence Capital. Yaz El-Baba will be joining the board with Gordon Ritter observing. The leadership team at Bland will use the funds to continue helping businesses streamline how they communicate with their customers. Whether its customer support, sales, or operations, Bland is committed to changing the way we communicate in the future. With this round of financing, Bland has raised a total of $65M; other investors include: Scale Venture Partners, Y Combinator and angel investors including Max Levchin, Piotr Dąbkowski, Jeff Lawson, and others.
Millions of people spend their days sitting at their desks with a phone in hand. Picking up, dialing, and repeating the same words over and over again. This harms everyone– the business who spends millions for bad outcomes, the employee who hates what they do, and the customer who sits on hold for hours on end. Bland was founded to reinvent the way businesses use the most relied upon, yet outdated telecommunication system there is: phone calls.
“Voice is the natural communication method for humans. For decades, powering personalized, human-like voice experiences was impossible, with most modern technologies taking the easy way out: chat and text”, says Yazan El-Baba of Emergence Capital. “Bland embraces the complexity and challenge of giving their customers’ customers what they actually want: a fast, reliable, and personable voice experience. And, they’re executing against that with an intensity and velocity that is unparalleled in this industry.”
Bland.com allows enterprises to securely/safely build, test, and deploy their own AI phone calling agents. It starts with customers creating their own conversational pathways, a tree of prompts that dictates how the AI might respond to any given response from a customer. Once a pathway is built out, the AI agent can traverse the pathway to figure out the right response, allowing it to always stay on track and help the customer, regardless of what the AI encounters. This makes every AI agent a perfect employee, who never gets annoyed and always knows the right answer.
Some notable aspects of the platform include:
- Integrations into any other system, knowledge retrieval from documents, and the ability to transfer to a human when necessary.
- Transcripts of calls, post-call analytics, and the ability to train the AI on your own phone calling data.
- Voice cloning, multi-language support, an AI testing system, and infinite calling scalability.
- End-to-end infrastructure to ensure security, stability, and observability.
Some of the largest enterprises in the world are already generating and saving revenue with Bland. Customers like The University of Phoenix, the Cleveland Cavaliers, and Better.com are creating custom AI agents, configuring and personalizing how it should react, deploying it to answer or send phone calls, extracting information to see detailed analytics, and passing any relevant data back into the company’s existing systems.
“Our mission is to fix the way businesses handle the way they communicate with their customers,” says Isaiah Granet, CEO and Co-Founder of Bland.com. “The problem is that humans simply can’t work 24/7, handle millions of phone calls simultaneously, or be trained to a company’s exact liking down to its voice and behavior – but AI can, and at a fraction of the cost. We want Bland to work alongside enterprises’ employees to improve efficiency across the board.”
The Bland team will continue building a world-class system that allows companies in healthcare, real estate, logistics, financial services, and more to connect with their customers in a positive and cost-efficient manner.
Bland is committed to the highest standards of trust and safety. The platform actively restricts the calls supported, ensuring that the AI phone call technology continues to benefit consumers, businesses, and society as a whole. Bland also is entirely self-hosted, allowing customers to adhere to data processing laws such as HIPAA and GDPR, protecting the personal information of their customers.
To test it out, start building for free, or to see open roles go to https://www.bland.com/. For enterprises interested in a more advanced version of Bland, visit https://app.bland.ai/enterprise.
About Bland.com
Bland is a conversational AI platform that automates phone calls for businesses using hyper-realistic AI agents. Founded in 2023, Bland’s mission is to revolutionize how enterprises handle phone communications, enabling more efficient, personalized interactions at scale. Investors include Emergence Capital, Scale Venture Partners, Y Combinator and angels. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, with a global team of AI experts and industry veterans. For more information go to https://www.bland.com/.