Exclusive: Voice AI startup Bland raises $50 million after being rejected by 180 investors

Isaiah Granet was rejected by 180 investors in three weeks during Y Combinator. Their reason: phone calls won’t exist in a year. He’s raised more than $100 million to prove them wrong. Bland, the San Francisco voice AI company Granet co-founded in 2023 with Sobhan Nejad, closed a $50 million Series C led by Dell Technologies Capital, Fortune learned exclusively. Hub Spot Ventures, Archerman, and Tribeca joined the round; existing backers Emergence Capital, Upfront Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, Y Combinator, Affirm co-founder Max Levchin, ElevenLabs CTO Piotr Dąbkowski, and Twilio founder Jeff Lawson also participated. The company raised a $16 million Series A in August 2024 and a $40 million Series B led by Emergence in January 2025. New capital will go toward expanding research, growing the engineering team, and scaling into more regulated industries. Bland’s origin story is personal: Nejad’s aunt, unable to get through to her insurance company by phone, was denied access to medical treatment. The two founders—both engineers—set out to build a phone agent that could stay on the line long enough to actually fix the problem. Many voice AI tools today wrap around third-party models and handle short, scripted calls: appointment reminders, basic routing, password resets. Bland’s platform runs exclusively on its own proprietary, in-house-built voice models, and won’t let customers integrate models from OpenAI or Anthropic into the tech—even if they wanted to. “We are one of one in that sense,” Granet told Fortune. “When you come to use Bland, we say, here’s what you’re gonna use, you’re gonna like it, we hope—and we’re gonna deliver a better phone call, and we’re ready to own that.” A typical Bland call runs 30–45 minutes—in healthcare, that might mean walking an elderly patient through a blood pressure reading, troubleshooting errors, and deciding in real-time whether to escalate to emergen