Guava announced a $12.5 million seed led by Acrew Capital on Tuesday to develop its voice-agent platform and build a sales team serving enterprises and call-center outsourcers. The company draws on years of voice research at Gridspace.
CEO Omri Dahan, previously a Gridspace investor, founded Guava with Gridspace’s technical co-founders Anthony Scodary and Nico Benitez, according to the announcement. In a May 2024 interview with Sramana Mitra, Scodary said most of Gridspace’s revenue came from SIFT, software that analyzes live call-center conversations.
Guava targets developers building automated phone services for healthcare, insurance and financial firms. Its appointment-booking example lets engineers connect their scheduling software and specify the information an agent must collect; Guava handles the speech and telephone connection.
The company says it develops its own speech models. Its published plans combine subscriptions with call-minute allowances and usage charges. Enterprise customers can negotiate volume pricing and dedicated infrastructure, with an engineer assigned to help design the integration with their systems.
Guava’s September 23 benchmark placed its Daytona model first overall among four tested voice-AI configurations. On call resolution, however, Daytona earned 67% of available points, compared with 79% for ElevenLabs paired with GPT 5.4. These company-published results combined automated scoring with blind comparisons by outside evaluators.