We're excited to share that Cekura has raised $2.4 million in seed funding with participation from Y Combinator, Flex Capital, Hike Ventures, Kulveer Taggar, Pioneer Fund, Chris Smoak, Ooshma Garg, Richard Aberman, JJ Fliegelman, Decacorn, Alan Rutledge, Imagination Capital, Allport Capital, Ignite Ventures, Klaus Sayn-Wittgenstein, Matt Lenhard, Jinal Jhaveri, Patrick D. Deem, Jr., Austen Allred, Avinash Gupta Konda, Amitav Chakravartty, Allen Wu, Raphael Schaad and Rishi Penmetcha.
Why We Built Cekura
Last year, we found ourselves manually dialing into a healthcare voice assistant we had built, trying to test it. We had spent weeks fine-tuning this AI agent, yet every update still required hours of manual testing. A critical failure still slipped through a real call. We knew immediately there must be a better way.
This conviction led us to build what is now Cekura. We built the platform we wished had existed: one that could simulate countless conversations at scale, generate the tricky edge-case scenarios we would never think of, and monitor real calls for any sign of failure. We wanted to catch problems before our customers did.
Crucially, we weren't starting from scratch in tackling this challenge. All three of us had deep, complementary expertise in building reliable systems. Shashij has published a research paper on AI systems testing during his time at ETH Zurich and Google. Tarush came from the high-stakes world of quantitative finance. He had built low-latency trading simulations where even millisecond hiccups were unacceptable. And I brought a background in leading large customer experience teams in contact centers and advising Fortune 500 companies on operations. We all met during undergrad at IIT Bombay and have been close friends for eight years. This shared history and mix of skills gave us the confidence that we were the right people to tackle conversational AI reliability from all angles.
Why Now
The past year has indeed seen an explosion in conversational AI, but this rapid adoption has exposed a critical vulnerability: unpredictable AI behavior. Enterprises are quickly realizing that while AI agents promise unprecedented scale and efficiency for customer support, sales, and internal operations, their inherent unpredictability – fluently answering one minute, hallucinating critical information the next – poses significant business risks. Traditional manual QA, involving teams literally calling bots or sifting through transcripts, is not only painfully slow but also fundamentally incapable of keeping pace with the complexity and scale of modern AI deployments.
So why is now the right time for Cekura? Because expectations from conversational AI are shifting from novelty to mission-critical. When a voice bot handles banking transactions or a chat AI assists in a medical query, failure is not an option. However, failures will happen without robust testing and monitoring.
We see a perfect storm of factors: enterprises pushing AI agents into production, regulators and customers demanding accountability, and engineering teams realizing that what got them through pilot projects won't scale in production.
The timing cannot be better for a solution that ensures these AI agents are reliable from day one and stay reliable as they scale.
Our Vision for Reliable Conversational AI Agents
Our vision is to make building a reliable Conversational AI agent as straightforward as spinning up a website. Enterprises should be able to trust their AI voice and chat agents the same way they trust their best human employees, and we're working towards making that a reality. That means going beyond generic metrics like response time or interruption rate and understanding contextual correctness.
Cekura helps teams define what "correct" means for them, and automatically validate it. Every company has its own policy and tone; our platform is able to enforce those unique standards.
Our long-term goal is to elevate the quality bar for all AI-driven conversations. We want a world where interacting with an AI agent feels helpful and secure, no matter if you're chatting with a retail customer support bot or talking to your car's voice assistant.
Work with Us
We are using this funding to rapidly expand our team to move closer to our vision of making voice and chat AI agents reliable and secure. If you share our goal of building reliability layer of Conversational AI or want to know more about the product, please reach out to founders@cekura.ai
