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Autumn Moss Peñaloza is Senior Startup Program Manager at Vonage, leading the Vonage Startup Program for early-stage teams building with communications APIs. Outside of work, you’ll find her traveling with family, playing with her rescue dog, and daydreaming about horseback riding.
Six Global Startups Building AI Solutions With Vonage
Time to read: 4 minutes
At Vonage, we believe that the most ambitious ideas deserve the most reliable communications infrastructure to bring them to life. We recently welcomed six remarkable new startups to the Vonage Startup Program, a diverse cohort spanning HR Tech, conversational AI, collectables, SMB operations, HealthTech, and European AI telephony. Each of these teams is using Vonage APIs to build platforms that leverage the power of multichannel communication, so let's meet them.
Kolab is a recruitment platform trusted by some of Brazil's largest enterprises — including Itaú, Santander, PepsiCo, and Anheuser-Busch InBev — to hire operational talent at scale across 30+ countries. Their suite includes an ATS, gamified assessments (Kolab Stories), group evaluation tools (Kolab Dynamics), and a proprietary talent scoring algorithm (Kolab Score). Kolab is leveraging the Vonage Messages API to power a WhatsApp-native recruiter experience, and the Voice API to enable AI-driven audio and video interviews, delivering the entire hiring journey through the conversational interfaces candidates already use. Most recently, Kolab ran Anheuser-Busch InBev's global management trainee program across 30+ countries, assessing over 100,000 candidates.
Tunk.ai, founded by Diwakar Set, gives businesses an AI workforce they can deploy in plain English, with no coding required. Their platform, Anchor, lets companies build and deploy AI voice agents that handle customer calls end-to-end: understanding intent, accessing business systems, completing tasks, and handing off to a human when genuinely needed. Tunk.ai uses the Vonage Voice API for the telephony layer that connects their AI agents to real phone conversations at production scale, having already handled more than 50,000 production conversations for financial services customers in India. With international expansion into the US underway, Tunk.ai is building the conversational AI workforce platform for the next era of customer operations.
AgentGrail, founded by Evan Barnard, gives trading card collectors the edge a professional grader has before they spend the money. Collectors simply text a photo of a raw card to a Vonage number and receive an instant AI-powered BUY, PASS, or REVIEW recommendation with a confidence score, with no app or signup required. AgentGrail uses the Vonage Messages API for both this frictionless acquisition flow and for outbound re-engagement of lapsed users, reducing the entire customer lifecycle to just one channel. Just launched with a newly rebuilt ML model, AgentGrail is already expanding its catalog beyond basketball, football, baseball, and Pokemon cards into Magic: the Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh, and One Piece.
DavidAI, co-founded by Hirwa Venuste KC, is on a mission to meet small and mid-sized business owners in East Africa exactly where they already are. Instead of a dashboard, business owners in Rwanda can check what sold today, update stock, or track who owes money, all by sending a WhatsApp message or making a phone call, in Kinyarwanda, Swahili, French, or English. DavidAI uses the Vonage Voice API for multilingual real-time voice, the Vonage Messages API for WhatsApp and Messenger, and the SMS API as a fallback in low-connectivity areas. Built by a small self-taught team with no outside cash investment, DavidAI is now processing 50,000+ messages per month across 21+ live businesses, with 35 more companies in onboarding conversations.
Medigize, founded by Omar Teleb, is building the connective layer the healthcare journey in Africa and the Middle East has been missing. Their platform combines a personal health record, structured triage, and AI-assisted virtual consultations to guide patients from first symptom to post-service follow-up, while keeping clinicians firmly in control of clinical decisions. Medigize uses the Vonage Video API for secure virtual consultations and the Verify API for identity verification, appointment coordination, and workflow notifications, creating one seamless, connected patient journey. With signed LOIs in hand and a production MVP launch on the horizon, Medigize is poised to become the leading healthcare navigation platform for the region.
Kollie AI, founded by Slava Todavchich, is bringing intelligent voice automation to businesses across the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany. Their AI telephone agents handle automated inbound and outbound calls as well as emergency support calls, helping businesses optimize their processes without adding headcount. Built on the Vonage Voice API, Kollie is focused on becoming the go-to AI telephony provider in their home markets, and the Vonage Startup Program gives them the enterprise-grade infrastructure to get there.
These six startups represent bold, mission-driven innovation the Vonage Startup Program was built to support, from East African SMBs running on WhatsApp to AI voice agents scaling across continents. If you're building a communications-powered product, whether in HealthTech, FinTech, HR Tech, or beyond, we'd love to hear from you. The Vonage Startup Program offers access to our full suite of APIs, dedicated support, and a community of founders changing the world one conversation at a time. Apply today and start building.
Apply to the Vonage Startup Program and join the conversation on our Vonage Developer LinkedIn page.
Share:
Autumn Moss Peñaloza is Senior Startup Program Manager at Vonage, leading the Vonage Startup Program for early-stage teams building with communications APIs. Outside of work, you’ll find her traveling with family, playing with her rescue dog, and daydreaming about horseback riding.