Guava raises $12.5 million

Los Angeles-based Guava AI Systems has raised $12.5 million in seed funding led by Acrew Capital, with participation from Flourish Ventures, WillowTree Ventures, Clocktower Ventures and existing investor Commerce Ventures.

Guava provides a platform for developers to build AI voice agents for customer service, appointment scheduling and other phone-based tasks. It develops and operates its own speech recognition, language and speech synthesis models, while allowing businesses to control agents through code, business rules and connected knowledge bases.

Insurance is among its target industries, with potential applications including claims and member services.

Its first public model, Daytona, launched in September.