Giga raises $61 million to expand enterprise voice AI, starting with DoorDash

Founded by IIT Kharagpur alumni and Forbes 30 Under 30 alums Varun Vummadi and Esha Manideep, Giga already works with food delivery company DoorDash. With the new funding, the company is looking to increase usage within Fortune 100 organizations and grow its team.

The voice AI space is crowded and competitive, mostly because of its ability to automate a lot of customer support work. The sector includes everything from niche startups like ElevenLabs and Vapi to tech giants like Amazon and Microsoft, which are vying for a share of a market expected to grow from $3.14 billion in 2024 to $47.5 billion by 2034.

Voice AI has the potential to simplify many customer service tasks in businesses, such as answering routine customer questions or scheduling appointments, without the need for human agent intervention. Many companies are already using chatbots to automate various written communications with customers, but realistic voice AI good enough to have natural conversations has the potential to handle many more customer interactions.

“It’s about giving back time. Even in chat or calls, people go through ridiculous flows. We want to simplify the process so that problems are resolved easily and quickly,” said Fumadi, co-founder of Giga. luck.

Vummadi sees Giga’s execution speed as one of its key competitive advantages. He said the company can deploy enterprise-level AI support in less than two weeks.

“We’re very product-driven where companies can come in and download all the existing scripts for support agents and their policies, and we automatically build that into our system, so the time to evaluate it is dramatically reduced,” he said.

The other reason is Giga’s ability to perform multiple actions in real time. The startup has built a unified, real-time orchestration layer that manages all the different things AI needs to do simultaneously, like listening, understanding what’s being said, deciding how to respond, checking databases, and responding. All tasks the system can perform in less than half a second. For example, at DoorDash, if a Dasher cannot complete a delivery, the Giga system can maintain direct contact with the Dasher, contact the consumer to verify the address, and perform policy compliance verification, all automatically and in real-time.

“At DoorDash, we work at scale across services, platforms and languages,” said Andy Fang, co-founder of DoorDash. “Giga has leveraged usage data to deliver measurable improvements, including fewer escalations, faster resolution paths, and more efficient workflows across our teams. As we continue to grow across more than 40 countries and serve nearly 50 million people each month, partnerships like this are essential to driving better consumer outcomes on a global scale.”

Language and dialect barriers

If successful, voice AI companies could help companies reduce resolution times, reduce escalations, and reduce the need for large call center teams. However, experts have warned that automated voice AI has historically struggled with nuance and emotional intelligence, especially when interacting with non-native speakers.

While voice AI systems are typically trained on large speech data sets, these data sets are heavily skewed toward “standard” American or British English, meaning that people with strong regional accents often find themselves misunderstood. The problem is also particularly acute for elderly users or people with speech difficulties, especially as these systems are increasingly deployed in critical areas such as healthcare and government services.

To combat some of these bias issues, Giga works with open source, multilingual LLMs and has developed a feature that allows clients to choose to speak the native language.

“We’ve seen a lot of dialect problems go away if people speak their native language. Multilingualism is a very powerful advantage,” Fumade said. “We also store user preferences over time, so every interaction improves.”

Expansion of finance and health care

Giga plans to use some of the capital to fund expansion into more regulated industries such as healthcare and finance. For these segments, the company deploys its entire system on the customer’s cloud infrastructure using open source models. Giga can never access customer data when published this way, Vummadi says.

In financial services, Giga is already working with many clients and is being used to automate compliance processes, such as reporting unusual transactions. When customers make transfers that deviate from their normal patterns, AI can communicate to confirm the source and maintain the paper trail required by regulators. “These processes will be automated using artificial intelligence, basically like human communication,” Fumade said, adding that the system can refer details to external databases like Zillow to verify real estate sales to prevent fraud.

“What excites me most about Giga is that it’s not just about building a best-in-class support bot,” said Satish Dharmaraj, Managing Director, Redpoint Ventures. “The team is building a foundational AI layer for the voice of the customer – one that can understand nuances, contextual reason, and scale with enterprise reliability.”