Guava, a Los Angeles developer platform for building and controlling voice AI agents, raised a $12.5m seed round led by Acrew Capital, announced on 3 November 2026. Flourish Ventures, WillowTree Ventures, Clocktower Ventures and Commerce Ventures also took part. Value Add VC described Commerce Ventures as an existing investor from an earlier, undated and unsized investment, and the company's release called it a pre-seed investor.
Guava said the money will go to continued model and product development and to building a go-to-market team for enterprises and business process outsourcers, known as BPOs. No valuation was disclosed.
What Guava builds
Guava runs its own speech recognition, language models and speech synthesis as a single stack, rather than relying on third-party APIs. Its first public model, Daytona, launched in September 2026. The company said Daytona has ranked in the top 10 of Coval's word error rate benchmark, often first or second, supports more than 12 enterprise customers and handles tens of thousands of calls a day.
Developers can build on it in Python, TypeScript or Claude Code, and the company says a working agent takes under five minutes on a free tier. It said enterprise customers typically take their first live call on a regulated line within 14 days of kickoff. These are company claims.
Anthony Scodary, a co-founder and co-head of engineering, explained the choice to build every layer in-house: relying on other vendors' models means taking on their delays, outages and release timing.
The Gridspace connection
Guava builds on research from Gridspace, which the release described as a frontier voice lab with more than a decade of foundation-model development. The release said Gridspace trained its models on more than 10 billion minutes of live conversations from regulated call centres. Pulse 2.0, cited by Value Add VC, reported that Guava's technology traces back to Gridspace.
Omri Dahan is co-founder and chief executive. He spent more than a decade as chief revenue officer at Marqeta, helping it grow from its first revenue to its public-market filing, and was previously an investor in Gridspace. Scodary and Nico Benitez, who worked with him at Gridspace, are technical co-founders, and Value Add VC listed Mike Piechna as a fourth co-founder. The sources did not give a founding year or a headcount.
What the founders and investors said
Dahan said most companies the founders spoke with were unhappy with the voice AI they had tried, because it could impress in a demo yet fail on important live calls.
Lauren Kolodny, founding partner at Acrew Capital, said of the team: "His co-founders have been building voice AI for over a decade, long before it was fashionable". Emmalyn Shaw, co-founder and managing partner at Flourish Ventures, said Guava gives developers control while delivering leading performance across key industry benchmarks.
Value Add VC placed the round in a crowded field. It cited Vapi's $50m Series B led by Peak XV in May 2026, bringing its total funding to $72m, and Giga's $61m Series A led by Redpoint Ventures. The release cited a Meticulous Research forecast that the global voice AI agents market will grow from $5.1bn in 2026 to $43.8bn by 2036.
Company website: goguava.ai