Voiceflow raises $3.5 million to build the future of voice interface design.
Investment to build the future of voice interface design.
April 23rd, 2019
Today we’re announcing that Voiceflow has raised an additional $3 million USD, led by Tony Conrad at True Ventures in San Francisco. This brings Voiceflow’s total funding to $3.5 million USD in the past 5 months.
We’ve come a long way from building interactive children’s stories on Alexa in a crammed dorm-room office only 8-months ago.
It’s an exciting time for our team, and we’re ready to help pull our weight in pushing the future of voice interfaces forward.
We’re thrilled to add new angel investors in InVision founder Clark Valberg, Eventbrite founders Julia & Kevin Hartz, ProductHunt founder Ryan Hoover, TechToronto founder Alex Norman, and Fancy founder Jack Einhorn.
We’re also adding new partners through DFJ Ventures, Hustle Fund, Ramen Ventures, Cross Culture VC, Jetstream, N49P, Abstract Ventures, and Shrug VC.
Thank you to our investors, friends, family, and partners. But most importantly, thank you to our users, customers, and community members. You are what makes Voiceflow a truly special community to be a part of and we’re excited to continue to work with you every day.
This new funding helps us expand the team and push forward on product developments to help voice interfaces become more ubiquitous, human, and engaging.
Before and after this funding our mission has stayed the same:
To help people have better conversations with technology.
The future we’re building towards.
We’re pursuing our mission through making voice interfaces design focused, collaboratively created, and widely accessible.
We believe voice interfaces represent the future of human-computer interaction, and a new way to search for information. However, our industry has challenges to overcome that will require every company, VUI/UX designer, linguist, developer, writer, and creative in our space to help out. Clunky conversational design, poor discoverability, and a lack of industry-wide standards have led many voice apps to feel confusing and frustrating to the end user. It’s our collective mission to solve these problems and help people have better, more human conversations with technology.
To address this future and do our part, we’re building the best platform for the design and development of voice interfaces. We’re starting by helping professionals build better conversational experiences that are design focused, collaboratively created, and widely accessible.
Today, in addition to announcing our funding — we’re announcing two new features to the Voiceflow platform that move us closer to our goal of helping people have better conversations with technology.
Feature announcements
Making voice interfaces more accessible
Voice should be accessible to everyone, regardless of technical abilities. The best conversational designs could come from creatives with only an idea and no knowledge of VUI design. We have to support this reality.
Connecting to third-party services through VUIs right now can only be done through an API call. Many users rely on no code platforms like Airtable, Google Sheets, and IFTTT to power their designs, but are forced to connect through code-heavy APIs.
We want to help everyone access third-party services faster, and easier. So, we’re launching: VF integrations.
Starting off with Google Sheets, VF Integrations will allow anyone to quickly and easily access 3rd party services without coding.
This is our V0 — with future integrations to be launched soon.
Created in collaboration
The best voice experiences are built by teams of people with unique backgrounds. Developers, designers, UX experts, and linguists all have a unique role to play in building the interfaces of tomorrow.
Today, collaboration in voice is a messy handoff of Google docs, flowcharts, excel sheets and hardcoded prototypes. To move the future of interfaces forward, we’re launching: VF Teams.
VF Teams changes the entire way Voiceflow is structured — from a standalone tool to the central platform for teams building voice experiences.
As always, this is our V0. Future iterations will have live editing, role specializing, and further permissions.
Another thank you to our users
Of course, Voiceflow wouldn’t continue to exist without our early supporters. Thank you to all of our users who put up with plentiful bugs and occasional mishaps. You sticking with us has allowed the team to make it this far and continue to build the platform you’re waiting for.
How to get involved
There are several ways to get involved with Voiceflow:
- Get started with VF: you can sign up for free at Voiceflow.com
- Join our Community: many of Voiceflow’s most active community members are all within the VF Facebook Group here.
- Join the Voiceflow team: we’re looking for passionate, talented people to join our small but growing team. You can apply to join here.
- Get in touch: have an idea, suggestion, or way to help? Let’s chat: braden@voiceflow.com