Coval raises $28 million Series A to scale simulation-driven testing infrastructure for enterprise voice agents

I’m excited to announce @covaldev raised a $28M Series A, led by @NorwestVP with participation from @Base10Partners, @twilio Ventures and @ycombinator, among others.

I started Coval with the belief that the simulation and evaluation approaches that made autonomous vehicles a reality could unlock the same for voice AI. That parallel has only gotten sharper as enterprises deploy autonomous conversational agents at scale.

Voice and chat are the new interface in the AI era. Talking is the most natural way to interact with complex autonomous systems. The same way web and mobile transformed every enterprise, every company will have a voice agent as the front door to their product. This platform shift is happening now.

From Y Combinator to working with companies like @DeepgramAI, @perplexity_ai , and @Zoom, it's been a wild ride. We watched voice AI go from an emerging modality to every Fortune 500 enterprise building a conversational interface.

Autonomous agents are the future. But you can't ship and hope for the best when agents are taking on real work. The stakes are too high.

Coval will be what enables us to actually trust those agents. The platform to help teams reliably scale voice and chat agents.

We wouldn’t be here without Coval’s founding engineers @rheacoval and Kobi Hudson. Rhea took a chance on Coval before we had a single customer, a line of code, or an office that wasn't my couch. Kobi left @Waymo after 10 years building foundational simulation systems to help us build the frontier of voice simulation.

To the full Coval team - you all are insane engineers and builders who inspire me every day. Rob Young Alejandra Vergara Henry Finkelstein Callum Reid Dakota Mallen Dana Dzik Mallory McLoughlin Christopher Kuester Jake Levi Brooke Hartley Kappi Patterson

To all our investors - @NorwestVP, @Base10Partners Partners, @twilio Ventures, @ycombinator, @alumniventures, Swift Ventures, Fortitude VC and so many more. You are what made Coval possible.

To @koh_terai who brought my video vision to life.

And last but certainly not least, thank you to everyone who's been building with us.

We're just getting started.

Brooke Hopkins (@bnicholehopkins) is the founder and CEO of @covaldev, a simulation and observability platform that helps enterprises test, monitor, and evaluate AI-powered voice agents at scale.

Coval works with customers like Perplexity and Deepgram to process tens of millions of calls per month and has just raised a $28.2M Series A.

Brooke sat down with @harjtaggar to talk about how leading evaluation infrastructure at Waymo turned out to be surprisingly transferable to voice agents, why voice is emerging as the first productionized use case for autonomous agents, and how she narrowed a broad evals idea into a focused enterprise platform—including the moment a customer offered to pay her before she'd written a single line of code.

01:16 — Why Voice Is the Killer AI Interface 02:37 — How Enterprises Are Adopting Voice 05:44 — The Missing Infrastructure for Voice 06:58 — Where Voice Agents Fail 12:32 — Lessons From Waymo 16:38 — What Product-Market Fit Actually Feels Like 18:20 — Why They Bet on Enterprise 25:35 — Leaving Waymo to Go Solo 29:02 — What's Next for Coval