Forward Deployed: Voice AI - The Next Frontier
Most companies are still figuring out where voice AI fits. The ones in this room are already deploying it.
Join the founders and operators from Decagon, Smallest.ai, Vapi, and Daily for an unfiltered conversation on what it really takes to build and ship voice AI at enterprise scale.
Practical, no-fluff, grounded in real experience. Not demos.
🎤 🎤 🎤 SPEAKERS 🎤 🎤 🎤
BASIA SUDOL | Head of Enterprise Solutions @ Decagon | $481M Raised
Founded in 2023, Decagon tripled its valuation to $4.5B in just six months, adding 100+ enterprise customers in 2025 alone. Basia leads enterprise solutions, including voice scoping and deployments.VARUN SINGH | CPTO @ Daily.co | $62.2M Raised
The infrastructure powering real-time voice AI for enterprise since 2016 — healthcare, financial services, government. Daily also built Pipecat, the most widely used open source framework for realtime AI agents: 12,000+ GitHub stars, 40+ AI services supported, fully open source and vendor neutral.STEVEN DIAZ | FDE MANAGER @ Vapi | $72M Raised
1 billion calls handled. 1 million developers. 2.7 million unique agents built on the platform. Amazon Ring chose Vapi over 40 rivals — customer satisfaction improved after deployment.TYLER D'SILVA | Founding FDE @ Retell AI | $60M ARR
$60M in annualized revenue in April 2026, up 650% year-over-year. Built to $50M+ ARR with a team of just 30 people. Powering 50M+ real-time AI phone calls every month — on just $5.1M raised. One of the most capital-efficient growth stories in voice AI.SUDARSHAN KAMATH | Founder @ Smallest.ai | Series A, (undisclosed funding)
Smallest AI is a research lab building real-time voice models. Pulse, its STT model, ranks #1 on Sierra's μ-Bench and Artificial Analysis. Smallest's STT and TTS power 10B minutes of enterprise calls annually across multilingual ASR, voice automation, and agentic CX. The team is now pushing the frontier with new research into asynchronous speech-to-speech (STS) models, moving beyond sequential STT→LLM→TTS pipelines toward human-indistinguishable, real-time voice agents.
🏠 HOSTED BY FORWARD DEPLOYED
Forward Deployed is an AI-Native startup building agentic products for PE portfolio companies, Insurers, and other Enterprise teams. We also host fireside chats and podcasts with operators at the forefront of forward deployed engineering.
📅 Thurs, Jun 4th, 6-8:30pm PT
📍 Super secret, San Francisco
🎟 Seats are limited
✌️ Hosted at the Founders Cafe, AngelList's founder community and co-working space on the first floor of AngelList HQ. Apply here. This event is also made possible by Smallest.ai, Pilot, and Rho.
Rho is the all-in-one banking platform for startups and the accountants supporting them. With banking setup in minutes, up to 2% cashback cards, and powerful tools for managing spend, paying bills, and closing the books, Rho helps high-growth startups move fast and stay focused, backed by support that goes to the end of the earth to help you win.
Pilot provides the most reliable accounting and strategic services (fractional CFOs and COOs) for businesses. They partner with thousands of companies to help them grow sustainably and operate more effectively.