Simple AI Raises $14M Seed Round to Scale Voice Agents for B2C Sales Automation

Key Takeaways

1. Simple AI has secured a $14 million seed round led by First Harmonic, with participation from Y Combinator, Massive Tech Ventures, and True Ventures.
2. The San Francisco–based startup builds voice AI agents for direct-to-consumer sales and support, claiming its agents convert and upsell up to 30% more than trained human representatives.
3. Funding will be used to invest in Simple AI’s voice agent platform, custom generative AI models, and analytics and customer insights for businesses of all sizes.
4. Simple AI’s team believes voice AI will become the default for all inbound and outbound B2C calls, aiming to outperform human sales teams in efficiency and conversion at scale.

Quick Recap

Simple AI, a San Francisco–based voice AI agent platform, has raised a $14 million seed round led by First Harmonic, with Y Combinator, Massive Tech Ventures, and True Ventures also participating. The company announced the round alongside a public statement that it has spent the past year building AI voice agents to transform direct-to-consumer sales, betting that voice AI will power the future of B2C calls. The official news was amplified via a post on X by Simple AI co-founder Catheryn Li and reshared by Y Combinator.

Excited to announce that @simpleailab has raised a $14M seed round led by @firstharmonic.

For the past year, we’ve been building AI voice agents to transform direct-to-consumer sales. We fundamentally believe that voice AI is the future of all B2C calls. pic.twitter.com/CjbVA2Gb18

— cat (@catheryn_li) February 10, 2026

Betting on Voice Agents That Sell

Simple AI’s core product is a voice AI agent that can fully handle inbound calls for sales and customer support, from answering queries to completing transactions. The platform ingests a brand’s entire product catalog including SKUs, metadata, and pricing and combines it with real-time customer data to personalize each interaction and execute actions such as placing orders or updating information.

Every call generates transcripts, summaries, and what the company describes as “actionable insights,” giving operators analytics on customer intent, conversion and call outcomes. With the fresh capital, Simple AI plans to deepen its investment in custom generative AI models and expand analytics and customer insights features to support businesses of all sizes, not just large enterprises.

Why This Voice AI Bet Matters Now?

The funding comes as enterprises and consumer brands race to automate high-volume voice channels, where human-staffed call centers remain costly and often deliver poor customer experience. Voice AI agents that can understand intent, navigate complex product catalogs, and complete transactions promise lower operating costs and 24/7 coverage, which is particularly attractive in direct-to-consumer segments with tight margins.

Simple AI’s focus on sales-oriented voice agents positions it in a fast-growing niche, competing with other specialized platforms that pitch human-like conversational performance at a fraction of the cost of traditional sales teams. At the same time, regulators globally are starting to scrutinize AI in customer contact, meaning robust consent, transparency and data handling practices will be crucial as these agents scale.

Competitive Landscape

For the emerging category of sales-focused voice AI agents, two comparable early-stage competitors are Voice Genie and Sela, both positioned around automated sales calls and lead conversion rather than broad contact-center suites. While product marketing for these players does not disclose token-level metrics like context window or pricing per 1M tokens, they each highlight differentiated capabilities in sales automation, cost structure and conversational performance.

Competitive Landscape

For the emerging category of sales-focused voice AI agents, two comparable early-stage competitors are Voice Genie and Sela, both positioned around automated sales calls and lead conversion rather than broad contact-center suites. While product marketing for these players does not disclose token-level metrics like context window or pricing per 1M tokens, they each highlight differentiated capabilities in sales automation, cost structure and conversational performance.

Strategic Analysis

Simple AI leads on total seed capital and latency transparency, signaling deeper conviction from investors in its proprietary stack and commercial traction with consumer brands. Retell AI, despite raising less, has demonstrated remarkable capital efficiency reportedly hitting $15M ARR with just 12 employees  making it arguably the most revenue-efficient player at seed stage. VoiceRun occupies a distinct niche as a developer-centric platform sitting between no-code builders and enterprise-heavy tools, targeting compliance-sensitive industries

Bayelsa Watch’s Takeaway

In my experience, rounds of this size at seed stage signal strong conviction from early investors that a category is about to inflect, and I think this is a big deal because voice remains one of the least-optimized channels in consumer sales. Looking at the investor syndicate and the focus on custom generative models, my view is that Simple AI is a bullish bet on specialized, vertically tuned agents rather than generic LLM APIs.

For sales and growth teams, this kind of product could accelerate adoption of AI on the phones by offering measurable uplift in conversion and lower staffing costs, which matters in a high-rate, margin-sensitive environment. I generally prefer companies that own the full stack from telephony routing to analytics because it gives them more room to differentiate on performance, and Simple AI appears to be building in that direction.