Guava Speech AI Software

Guava is new as a company but not as a technology. It is built on Gridspace, a voice AI lab that has trained models for more than ten years on over 10 billion minutes of live conversations in regulated call centers. Gridspace's technical co-founders, Anthony Scodary and Nico Benitez, teamed up with Omri Dahan, who spent more than a decade as chief revenue officer of payments company Marqeta and had invested in Gridspace, to build a focused commercial company around that research. Mike Piechna is the fourth co-founder and chief revenue officer.

The product is an API and SDK for voice agents. Guava's main argument is that most voice agents break on real calls because they are assembled from different vendors' parts and steered by ever-growing prompts. Guava runs its own speech recognition, language models, and speech synthesis as one system, and processes calls at wideband fidelity on supported carriers. Developers write business rules in Python or TypeScript, or through Claude Code, so a rule such as never reading a card number aloud is enforced in code and can be tested and versioned. The company says a developer can get a working agent in under five minutes, and enterprises typically take their first live regulated call within 14 days.

Its first public model, Daytona, launched in September 2026 and has ranked in the top 10 of Coval's word error rate benchmark. Guava aims at BPOs and at regulated work such as healthcare intake and prior authorization, insurance claims, bank KYC, collections, and government benefits, and it holds SOC 2 Type II, HITRUST i1, and PCI DSS Level 1 credentials with a BAA available for healthcare. On November 2, 2026 it announced $12.5 million in seed funding led by Acrew Capital, with Flourish Ventures, WillowTree Ventures, Clocktower Ventures, and Commerce Ventures.

1. Proprietary end-to-end voice stack with in-house ASR, language models, and TTS

2. Daytona voice model, launched September 2026

3. Python and TypeScript SDKs and a CLI to create, run, and deploy agents

4. Business rules written as versioned, testable code instead of prompts

5. Turn-taking and interruption handling built into the runtime

6. Wideband 16 kHz call processing on supported carriers

7. Escalation to a human with full context when the agent cannot finish a task

8. Real telephony and inbound and outbound calling from the first call

9. SOC 2 Type II, HITRUST i1, PCI DSS Level 1, and a healthcare BAA

10. Enterprise options for dedicated infrastructure, custom SLAs, and a forward deployed engineer

Guava publishes four plans billed by the minutes agents are actively working. Starter is free with 500 minutes a year, $0.15 per minute overage, and limited concurrency. Build costs $149 a month with 1,500 minutes a year and $0.14 per minute overage. Scale costs $499 a month with 7,000 minutes a year, $0.13 per minute overage, and a light SLA. Enterprise is custom, with volume-based pricing, no overages, dedicated infrastructure options, custom SLAs, a dedicated account manager, and a forward deployed engineer. SOC 2, PCI DSS, and HITRUST coverage is included on every account.

Guava does not name its customers publicly. It says Daytona serves more than a dozen enterprise customers and tens of thousands of calls per day.