January 15, 2025 -

Flair Labs (YC W24) has been listed in a16z's rising 100 voice AI application startups, and a standout within the real estate and lending vertical.

2024 was a huge year for voice agents, with massive model breakthroughs + new startups. How has the space evolved, and where do we see opportunity in 2025?

To start: we see voice as one of AI's biggest unlocks. In the last six months, we've seen massive steps forward on the model side. Latency and reliability are now largely solved - and interruptibility and emotionality have made major strides, too. Voice AI is now nearly at human standards, allowing tech to replace labor on the phone.

As a result, there's been an explosion in startups building applications on these models. Y Combinator alone has seen 30 voice agent companies. Many are targeting specific verticals - by industry (e.g. real estate, insurance, dental) or function (e.g. recruiting, customer support) - and are scaling fast!

In most cases, we see voice is a wedge - not the final product. Most companies need to tap into adjacent workflows: pushing call details to a CRM, automating follow-ups, etc.

What we're seeing in successful voice agent deployments and companies:

- Building in an industry where phone is the preferred or required medium, or has a much higher success rate than other modalities
- Calls are constrained — both in length and in format/outcome
- Voice agent delivers 50%+ cost reduction with similar success rate as a human
- Calls are "life or death" for the customer —they will pay significant $ to get them made or answered...but not for the end consumer
- When selling into SMB/mid-market, the agent product has easy integration. When selling into enterprise, complex integration can be a moat!