Vapi Targets Lower-Level Developer Control Compared to ElevenLabs' Abstracted Platform
Jordan Dearsley · His AI Voice Startup grew to $10M ARR in 1 Year—after 3 Years Stuck at $500K | Jordan Dearsley, F... · PMF Show · Jun 16, 2025 · at 15:56
Jordan Dearsley, co-founder of Vapi, contrasts Vapi's low-level developer orchestration platform with ElevenLabs' voice agent offering.
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“Now they have, like, a separate voice agent, like, platform that they've started to release, but it's a bit more abstracted. Whereas we're much more like low level, we expose all the raw pieces. So developers can like build like entire products on top of it.”
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“We grew to about half a million in revenue over like three years, and we just gave all the money back to all of the users and then just kind of moved to SF”
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“It kind of worked, you know, half million revenue is something, but it's not, Enough to build like something generational or a grander vision than notes. I think we can't realize. Yeah. People don't like notes.”
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“There was this one player called air AI at the time, and they were the first ones who ever were able to like build a business doing like AI phone calls, but they did fall into the trap of like over promising to users.”
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“We would see, like, 70% hallucination rates, like, 3.5 at the time”
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“Everyone just so focused on text, like, what was going on with LLMs, that no one realized that, oh, of course, like, other mediums are gonna be way more human and popular than the text medium.”
Dearsley: Developer-tuned voice APIs are physically impossible to shortcut
“And hard to actually physically impossible to shortcut. Like every single parameter in our API is from like us, like hearing from a developer, figuring out like the core pain that they have and shipping it and like seeing how they did and then tuning it again …”