Eight-month-old Cekura has raised a $2.4 million seed round led by Y Combinator to help fine-tune AI voice agents.
Flex Capital, Hike Ventures, Pioneer Fund, and Decacorn participated in the round, as did angel investors Kulveer Taggar, Chris Smoak, Ooshma Garg, Richard Aberman, and JJ Fliegelman.
Cekura — a riff on the word secure, rebranded from Vocera in March — was founded by a trio of IIT Bombay grads in their twenties: Sidhant Kabra, Tarush Agarwal, and Shashij Gupta. The company has seven employees and expects to onboard three others next month.
Kabra told Business Insider the longtime friends were working on AI agents in the healthcare space and struggling with quality assurance (QA) amid manual fixes that could take hours.
Cekura uses AI to simulate conversations and generate thousands of edge-case scenarios to put AI agents through their paces before going live.
“The customers will interrupt you, the customers will be toxic, the customers will try to jailbreak you, the customers will operate out of bias,” Kabra said. “You need to really stress test your agents before you go live.”
After that, Cekura works to detect issues and can add new features so agents can assume more responsibilities.
As call centers shift to AI, Cekura sees vast opportunity. The company monetizes via a subscription model for startup clients, beginning at $1,000 per month. It also has custom enterprise offerings. While roughly 90% of its business is focused on voice agents, it also builds chat agents, Kabra said.
Competitors include fellow Y Combinator grads like Coval and Hamming. (Most recently, the famed accelerator’s spring 2025 batch featured 70 startups focused on agentic AI — each of which received a $500,000 investment.)
Cekura has roughly 70 customers across industries — including in highly regulated spaces like healthcare and financial services, where “the threshold of reliability is pretty high,” Kabra said.
Some of its clients include AI mortgage servicing startup Kastle and Sandra — an AI receptionist for car dealerships.
Here’s a look at the pitch deck Cekura used to raise $2.4 million in seed funding. Some slides and details have been redacted in order to share the deck publicly.
