Calendar applications play a crucial role in enhancing productivity, yet distinguishing oneself beyond the fundamental features for sustainable growth can be challenging. Superpowered, a Y Combinator-backed project founded by Jordan Dearsley and Nikhil Gupta in 2020, initially aimed to be an AI-powered notetaker for meetings without relying on recording bots. However, facing obstacles in this direction, the company has decided to pivot and transform into Vapi, an API provider. Vapi enables easy creation of natural-sounding, voice-based AI-powered assistants.
Despite Superpowered’s profitability and a reported weekly user base of over 10,000 people, the team chose to tackle a more ambitious product. Instead of discontinuing Superpowered, the startup is in the process of appointing someone to oversee its operation.
Superpowered/Vapi has secured $2.1 million in seed funding from investors, including Kleiner Perkins and Abstract Ventures. The shift to Vapi involves offering an API that allows developers to create bots using prompts, which can then be linked to a phone number. Additionally, the company provides SDK integration for embedding the bot in websites and mobile apps.
The idea for Vapi emerged from Dearsley’s personal experience of missing friends and family in different time zones. To address this, he created an AI bot attached to a phone number, sparking the journey toward developing a more natural-sounding conversation platform.
Technically, Vapi currently integrates various third-party APIs to construct its voice conversation platform, using solutions from Twilio, Deepgram, Daily, OpenAI, and PlayHT. The startup’s current challenge is to reduce latency, aiming to achieve sub-1-second latency with ongoing improvements.
ScaleConvo, a startup in the YC winter batch for 2024, has already adopted Vapi to launch conversational bots for sales teams and property management companies. Despite facing challenges, Vapi remains optimistic about its future, with plans to build its own models for audio-to-audio solutions. The startup believes its edge lies in having built infrastructure capable of handling thousands of simultaneous calls, although it acknowledges the potential vulnerability associated with reliance on other APIs as the industry evolves.
