On February 11, 2026, the phone rang. Not the metaphorical kind. The real one. Somewhere between the first hello and the closed deal, a machine outsold a human by 30%. Quietly. Clinically. No ego. Just execution. That is not a demo. That is revenue with a pulse.
That machine belongs to Simple AI, the San Francisco based voice AI platform that just secured $14M in seed funding. First Harmonic led the round, with Y Combinator, Massive Tech Ventures, Samsung Next, True Ventures, Conviction Capital, HNVR, and a syndicate of 70 angels leaning in. Smart capital does not fund science experiments. It funds outcomes. This round signals that voice is no longer a support function. It is becoming a sales weapon.
Congratulations to Catheryn Li, Co Founder and CEO, and Zach Kamran, Co Founder and CTO. They met running software teams at Y Combinator, saw what large language models could become, and chose the hardest lane: the phone. Because chat is easy. Email is safe. Voice is where trust lives and money moves.
Simple AI builds voice agents that automate inbound and outbound B2C calls for consumer brands. Not bots that stall. Not IVR mazes that test a customer’s patience. These agents ingest full product catalogs, understand customer history, place orders, and optimize for conversion and upsell. End to end latency sits under 850 ms, which in conversation time feels natural. Fluid. Like a top rep who knows when to speak and when to let silence close the deal.
For the past year, these agents have been live in the wild, selling everything from steak to self storage to home insurance. That range matters. It proves the model travels. When you can train on your best human reps and deploy that performance infinitely, seasonality stops being a staffing nightmare and starts looking like margin expansion.
Here is the takeaway for operators paying attention. They did not lead with hype. They led with lift. A documented 30% improvement in conversion and upsell over trained live reps reframes the entire AI workforce debate. This is not about replacement. It is about performance density. Every call handled at peak output. Every time.
They built the full stack. Voice activity detection. End of turn detection. Transcription. Inference. Text to speech. Own the rhythm and you own the result. That discipline is why serious investors stepped in at $14M seed. Because when voice becomes programmable, revenue becomes predictable.
