At Acrew, each of us keeps a short list of repeat builders we would back the moment they decided to start something new. Omri Dahan has been on that list for a very long time. Over the years we have served on a board together, co-invested alongside him, and collaborated closely across fintech. So when he told us he was going back to building, we knew we wanted to be part of it.
At Marqeta, Omri helped turn card issuing from a years-long bank project into an API, which made it possible for a wave of fintech and on-demand companies to launch their own cards. He took it from its first dollar of revenue through its IPO filing, in a heavily regulated industry where earning trust and delivering reliable technology are essential.
We see the same pattern in Guava: new technology, turned into infrastructure that developers can build on, for high-stakes customer conversations, where trust and reliability are critical to winning customers.
A great deal of important customer work still happens on the phone, from scheduling appointments to live support, and many of those calls take place in regulated settings where they have to be accurate, secure, and auditable. Guava has built its own end-to-end voice stack: from speech recognition and language models to speech synthesis and telephony, rather than relying on a collection of third-party providers. Those models are trained on more than 10 billion minutes of live conversations from regulated call centers. Its platform allows developers to control agent behavior directly in code.
Omri has joined forces with a team well suited to the problem. Co-founders Anthony Scodary and Nico Benitez, both Stanford alumni, are the technical founders behind Gridspace, the voice AI lab whose research Guava is built on. Anthony previously worked on NASA’s Mars and Jupiter missions, while Nico helped build the streaming infrastructure at OnLive. Co-founder and CRO Mike Piechna brings more than 15 years of experience scaling early-stage revenue organizations.
In September, Guava launched Daytona, its first public model, along with an open benchmark that compares voice agents with human agents. Daytona already supports more than a dozen enterprise customers and tens of thousands of calls a day.
We are excited to back Guava alongside our friends at Commerce Ventures, Flourish Ventures, WillowTree Ventures and Clocktower Ventures.
To Omri, Anthony, Nico, Mike and the entire Guava team: welcome to the crew.
More on Guava:
Announcement coverage
Explore Guava