Nicholas Leonard and Derek Caneja wanted to build AI voice agents, but when they went to build the product, they felt many of these voice agents had design flaws.
Some of these agents were being built with no-code tools, meaning shipping to production was fast, but the quality of the product was often low. Other agents were being made by companies that had the time and resources to spend months building specialized tools. “Developers and enterprises needed an alternative,” Leonard told TechCrunch, adding that he and Caneja also realized that the future of software would be “coded, validated, and optimized by coding agents.”
“These two insights and a historical realization gave us the inspiration for VoiceRun,” Leonard, the company’s CEO, said. Caneja is the company’s CTO.
Last year, they decided to launch VoiceRun, a platform that lets developers and coding assistants launch and scale voice agents. Right now, many of these low-code platforms let people build voice agents with visual diagrams, where people click through conversation flows and write prompts into boxes that then dictate how the agent should behave. All of that can be hard to manage, Leonard said.
VoiceRun, on the other hand, lets users code how they want their voice agents to behave, giving them more flexibility in creating the product they want. Code is the native language of coding agents, Leonard explained. “They are going to do a far better job operating in code than in a visual interface,” Leonard said.
Furthermore, with visuals, there are limited configuration options, so, for example, if someone wanted to build a voice agent that could speak in a different dialect, it might be harder to do if the maker of the visual interface didn’t build a fea …