SAN FRANCISCO — Coval, an evaluation platform for voice AI, has reeled in a $28 million Series A round of financing led by Norwest with participation from Base10 Partners, Twilio Ventures and Y Combinator. This brings the total capital raised to $31 million since its launch in 2024.
Coval is the leading simulation, observability and labelling platform for AI voice and chat agents that allows enterprises to scale voice and chat AI agents. As Fortune 500 companies look to deploy voice AI and explore how it can change the paradigm for their businesses, Coval gives them the infrastructure to do it reliably and with confidence. The new funding will enable Coval to address the growing reliability and compliance challenges enterprises face as they deploy autonomous voice agents. Coval runs tens of millions of evaluations, and with this new capital, the company will expand its sales and solutions engineering teams to scale and meet this growing demand. Coval will also advance product capabilities including deeper simulation, new integrations, and enhanced human review and monitoring features.
“Every company is going to have a voice agent just like they have a mobile app or a web app. But today, most enterprises don’t have the infrastructure to deploy these systems with confidence,” said Brooke Hopkins, founder and CEO of Coval. “Coval gives teams the ability to simulate, monitor and continuously improve voice agents, so they can move from experimentation to reliable production at scale.”
The voice recognition market is growing rapidly, with more than $7 billion invested in voice AI in the first quarter of 2026 alone and expectations that it will reach more than $20 billion by 2031.
Enterprises are rapidly adopting voice AI for customer service, sales, financial services and healthcare, but most still rely on manual QA processes that break under real‑world complexity and scale. Coval’s platform empowers enterprises with a comprehensive testing and monitoring infrastructure for voice AI.
“Voice is going to be the number one interface for how humans interact with AI, and that shift creates an entirely new infrastructure layer for enterprises,” said Scott Beechuk, partner at Norwest. “With her deep experience building evaluation systems for autonomous technologies at Waymo, Brooke is uniquely positioned to lead Coval in defining how companies deploy and scale voice agents reliably. She helped prove self-driving cars could work, and now she’s tackling voice AI.”
Unlike other evaluation tools that are built for developers, Coval is built to help teams across operations, QA, engineering and product collaborate and scale autonomous agents. Coval offers a full‑stack platform spanning the entire voice agent lifecycle, from pre‑deployment simulation and live production monitoring to human review and structured evaluation. Its architecture is purpose‑built for voice, audio processing and quality analysis, telephony latency, transcription error analysis and evaluation of agent workflows. The company’s autonomous‑systems roots also set it apart, applying the simulation‑first discipline Hopkins developed at Waymo to bring production‑grade rigor to voice AI. Similar to self-driving cars, voice agents navigate the world autonomously by running models in parallel to listen (transcription), reason (LLMs) and speak (text-to-speech) in the same way that self-driving cars use perception, planning and controls to navigate the world. Testing between the two systems have similar parallels – simulation is critical for testing voice AI applications.
