Jordan Dearsley

Jordan Dearsley is co-founder and CEO of Vapi, the voice-agent platform he built with Nikhil Gupta after years of pivoting a meeting product. He talks about bending technology "back to the human voice," and he sells builders the plumbing for low-latency phone agents rather than a single vertical bot.

From Waterloo pivots to voice infra

Dearsley studied at the University of Waterloo and worked as an engineer at Shopify, Wealthsimple, and Asana before co-founding Superpowered with Gupta. The pair joined Y Combinator's Winter 2021 batch and cycled through meeting products - lecture tools, one-click joiners, note-takers - before the voice stack underneath an experimental AI therapist pointed at a bigger job. In founder interviews he has described hunting for a "10 out of 10" customer pain before scaling, and treating the early product thrash as tuition rather than failure.

Founding Vapi

In 2023 they relaunched as Vapi: APIs and tooling so developers can build, test, and run conversational voice agents on phone and web without owning every telephony and model integration themselves. A Bessemer investment note on the December 2024 Series A highlighted how quickly Friday feature requests showed up in production. Announcing the round, Dearsley put the commercial case plainly: consumer-facing companies run on voice, people do not scale, and classic IVR systems sound robotic enough that callers "smash zero" until a human answers.

On shipping voice as infrastructure

Public positioning stays on latency, observability, and minute economics for teams that want custom agents rather than a black-box contact-center suite. He still frames the company as infrastructure for other builders - the same instinct that survived the Superpowered years - and keeps product talk close to what developers can meter and debug.