We are pleased to share Ripple Ventures’ follow-on investment in Voiceflow’s Series A alongside Felicis Ventures, Craft Ventures, True Ventures, Amazon, Google and a powerful list of angel investors including Dylan Field (Figma CEO), Clark Valberg (InVision CEO), Julia & Kevin Hartz (Eventbrite Founders), Vlad Magdalin (Webflow CEO), Ryan Hoover (ProductHunt Founder) and others. This is such an incredible milestone for the team as they have evolved from being a building tool for interactive children’s stories on Amazon Alexa, into the leading collaborative platform for conversational interfaces.
The company has come a long way since we first invested in them in 2018, and we are lucky to have the opportunity to continue to support them. In the last 12 months the company has grown over 700% in ARR and has incredible enterprise customers including BMW, Home Depot, Google, US Bank, Mattel, Spotify, Ford, Motorola and Amazon, among others. They’re powering over 300 million messages per year for customers and continue to see exponential growth.
From the first time we met Braden, Andrew, Mike and Tyler we knew that they had something special! I will never forget meeting the team after I was referred to them by the RoseRocket CEO, Justin Sky. We met in the Techstars WeWork offices for our first meeting and Braden Ream led the product demo. He started by explaining the problem that they were hoping to solve, which at the time was helping Alexa hobbyists create their own interactive children's stories. For many potential investors, this introduction would have been a non-starter! After my time living in Boston and being an early user of the Alexa smart speaker, I knew this could be something bigger. We asked the team if they ever considered who else would be able to use this low-code design tool that they built for Alexa hobbyists and whether businesses like Starbucks or Dominos would one day use it to allow customers to order items from their smart speakers. Braden went a step further to explain how voice applications were just the start of interactive, conversational AI platforms that he believed will eventually be integrated into our daily lives.
Within 24 hours of meeting the Voiceflow team, our team agreed to lead their pre-seed round with a $300k investment and helped the company establish itself as a leading design tool for Alexa app developers. Shortly after leading the investment round, I met the team at the Next 36 offices in Toronto where they had been working, and helped to physically move their monitors and equipment into the Ripple incubator space, The Tank, the space that Voiceflow would call their home for the next year.
Over the next several months our Ripple team worked closely helping Voiceflow with sales, go-to-market strategies and overall business development.
In early 2019 after a year of rapid growth, Braden left for San Francisco to raise their Seed round. He booked a one way flight and built the deck on the plane! After spending weeks meeting with ventures funds, they met Tony Conrad at True Ventures. Tony, like us at Ripple, was immediately hooked on the passion and vision that Braden had laid out on what Voiceflow was trying to become and how they would get there.
True Ventures led the seed round and we at Ripple participated alongside several incredible angels such as Clark Valberg, Ryan Hoover, Kevin Hartz, and Vlad Magdalin. The Voiceflow team used this capital to focus on team building, and scaling out the product for new use cases.
Over the last year, Voiceflow has continued to democratize conversational AI by creating the best collaborative platform for conversational interfaces. Braden’s ability to mature as a young Founder and CEO has been nothing short of amazing along with the rest of the team. His ability to recruit top talent like Emily Lonetto, Rob Hayes & Teddie Straughn shows the team’s ability to share their vision and passion for building a world-changing company.
The Future
The future of Voiceflow is more exciting than its past. The team is building the modern collaborative platform for conversational AI — allowing anyone and any business to design, prototype, and launch incredible conversational experiences across any channel. Voiceflow is doing for teams what Twilio has done for developers — democratizing automated communications. As more enterprises expand their in-house conversational AI teams, we believe Voiceflow will become the foundational platform that powers conversational AI across every organization of any size.
As investors, we at Ripple can not be more proud of what the Voiceflow team has accomplished to date and are excited to continue to support them as their journey develops!
