VoiceRun, a voice AI startup founded by Nicholas Leonard and Derek Caneja, just closed a $5.5 million seed round led by Flybridge Capital. The platform takes a developer-first, code-based approach to building voice agents, positioning itself squarely between the quick-and-dirty no-code builders and the enterprise-heavy options. With the funding locked in, the company is betting that the future of voice automation lives in code, not visual interfaces.
Nicholas Leonard and Derek Caneja spotted a problem nobody was talking about. When they set out to build AI voice agents, they found the market was basically split in two: fast, cheap, and broken. Or slow, expensive, and thorough.
On one side sat the no-code platforms. Developers could click through visual diagrams, drop in some prompts, and ship something to production in days. But the voice agents that came out were brittle, unpredictable, and frankly embarrassing when customers interacted with them. On the other side were the sophisticated enterprises throwing months and entire engineering teams at specialized tools, delivering quality but at a scale only Fortune 500 companies could justify. "Developers and enterprises needed an alternative," Leonard told TechCrunch. There was nothing in the middle.
That insight, paired with another realization that the future of software development itself would be "coded, validated, and optimized by coding agents," led Leonard and Caneja to launch VoiceRun last year. The platform flips the script on how voice agents get built. Instead of dragging boxes around a visual interface and typing prompts into pre-made fields, developers write actual code to define agent behavior. It sounds simple, but it's a fundamental shift in how builders think about voice automation.
"Code is the native language of coding agents," Leonard explained. "They're going to do a far better job operating in code than in a visual interface." And he's right. Visual builders look flexible until you hit the edges. Want your voice agent to speak in a regional dialect? That's a hard no if the interface designer didn't anticipate it. Same goes for thousands of edge cases - custom integrations, special error handling, nuanced conversation flows. "There's a long tail of millions of little things you might want to do that aren't supported by the visual interface," Leonard said. "But in code, it's incredibly simple."
Beyond just the coding layer, VoiceRun bakes in features enterprise builders expect: instant A/B testing, one-click deployment, and global voice infrastructure. The target customer is enterprise developers building everything from AI phone concierges for restaurants to customer service automation. They're not chasing the quick-demo crowd. They're after the builders who need control, reliability, and the ability to iterate fast without begging their tools for new features.
