Bland Raises $50M Series C for Voice AI
Bland (bland.com), the voice AI platform that handles long, complex phone conversations for enterprises, has closed a $50 million Series C. The round was led by Dell Technologies Capital, with participation from new and existing investors along with Affirm co-founder Max Levchin, ElevenLabs CTO Piotr Dąbkowski, and Twilio founder Jeff Lawson. The news was first reported by Fortune.
Early seed investors in Bland include Pioneer Fund and Y Combinator. The company raised a $16 million Series A in August 2024, led by Scale Venture Partners, and a $40 million Series B led by Emergence in January 2025.
The company's path to this point wasn't smooth. CEO Isaiah Granet was rejected by 180 investors in three weeks during Y Combinator after the company pivoted. Most told him phone calls wouldn't exist in a year. Pioneer Fund was one of the few that believed in them early.
"The day Bland pivoted during YC back in 2023, I wrote in our team channel 'WOW, what a beautiful API'. This is in line with my thesis that AI systems become the universal API by hooking into existing human systems or existing computer systems as needed."
Tim Suzman, Managing Partner of Pioneer FundBland was founded in 2023 by Isaiah Granet and Sobhan Nejad. The origin story is personal: Nejad's aunt was unable to get through to her insurance company by phone and was denied access to medical treatment. The two engineers set out to build a phone agent that could stay on the line long enough to actually fix the problem.
Unlike most voice AI tools that wrap around third-party foundation models, Bland's platform runs exclusively on its own proprietary, in-house-built voice models, and won't let customers integrate models from OpenAI or Anthropic into the tech. Those models are purpose-built for voice and optimized for the constraints that make phone conversations hard: latency, interruptions, ambiguity, and the need to maintain context over long stretches.
A typical Bland call runs 30 to 45 minutes. In healthcare, that might mean walking an elderly patient through using a blood pressure cuff, troubleshooting errors, interpreting readings, and deciding in real time whether to escalate to emergency services. These are conversations that don't follow a script and can't be reduced to a phone tree.
"Most voice AI systems are built for simple interactions. We are focused on the calls that are hardest to automate. The ones that are long, non-linear, and where things can go wrong at any point."
Isaiah Granet, CEO and co-founderThe company now handles more than 3.5 million calls per week, processed over 175 million AI phone calls last year, and counts 250-plus enterprise customers including Samsara, Kin Insurance, and CNO Financial Group. Its core verticals are healthcare, financial services, and other regulated industries where mistakes carry real consequences.
The new funding will go toward expanding Bland's research efforts, growing its engineering team, and scaling the platform into more regulated industries. The competitive landscape is heating up: PolyAI raised $86 million at a $750 million valuation in December, and players like Replicant, Observe.ai, and Cognigy are all chasing enterprise call center budgets. Granet's bet is that owning the models and handling the hardest calls will separate Bland from the pack.