Retell AI in 2026: Revenue, Valuation, Funding, CEO

Retell AI reached a $100 million annualized run rate on November 12, 2026, with just $4.6 million raised. The Redwood City company builds AI voice agents that answer and make phone calls, and more than 4,000 customers now run 100 million-plus calls a month on it (Retell AI).

Retell AI at a glance

Retell sells the software to build phone agents: they answer and place calls, qualify leads, book appointments and hand callers to a person when needed. Customers pay by the minute. Call centers, car dealers, clinics, insurers and lenders use it, and so do brands such as Anker, Motorola, Lenovo and the San Antonio Spurs.

Retell AI in 2026: $100 million run rate on $4.6 million raised

Retell’s growth is unusual because it never raised after its seed. “We grew from $10M to $100M in 17 months, with $4.6M raised,” Bing Wu wrote on November 12, 2026 (LinkedIn). Retell went from $40 million in November 2025 to $80 million in September 2026, then added the last $20 million in two months.

Wu credits the product for doing work that rivals hand to engineers: “While much of our industry relies on large teams of forward-deployed engineers (FDEs), we’ve optimized our entire company to solve deployment complexities in the product itself.” Asbury Automotive, one example he gives, runs Retell agents for the service lines of its 157 dealerships.

Who owns Retell AI?

Retell AI is private. Its five co-founders own it with their staff and seed investors: Alt Capital, Jack Altman’s firm, led the round, with Y Combinator, Carya Venture and more than 20 founders and executives, among them Box’s Aaron Levie and YC’s Michael Seibel. No other investor has been disclosed, and there is no SEC filing for the company.

What is Retell AI’s revenue?

Retell doesn’t report revenue, only run rates as it passes milestones. Because customers pay per minute, its “ARR” is an annualized run rate of usage, not contracted subscriptions. The company says it has been profitable since late 2025, which SiliconANGLE also reported (SiliconANGLE).

Retell AI ARR (annualized run rate)

Retell’s own figures for late 2025 don’t line up: its about page says $40 million in November 2025, a December press release said “an ARR of $35M+” (Yahoo Finance), and an April 2026 release said it “grew to $50M ARR in 2025” (Yahoo Finance).

Retell AI MRR (monthly recurring revenue)

Retell doesn’t publish MRR. A $100 million run rate works out to about $8.3 million a month (our calculation).

How much has Retell AI raised? Funding and valuation

$4.6 million in total. “Retell AI has secured a $4.6 million seed funding round. This round is led by Alt Capital,” the company announced on August 27, 2024; it had raised the money by May 2024. No Series A or later round has been announced.

There is no priced valuation either. Retell’s own job ads say it has grown “20x from $5M to $100M+ in annualized revenue run rate in under two years, reaching a $1.5B+ valuation” (Retell AI), but the company hasn’t said who set that number or how; treat it as a claim.

What does Retell AI do? Products

• An agent builder for voice and chat agents, with phone numbers, batch calling, call transfer and tests that simulate calls

• Tell-1, its own language model, alongside models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google

• Retell Assure, automated quality checks of every call, launched in December 2025

• Conductor, an AI copilot that builds and tunes agents, launched in June 2026

• Workflows, a command-line tool, conversation memory and a built-in CRM, added through 2026

It is HIPAA and GDPR compliant and SOC 2 Type 1 and Type 2 certified, and supports more than 50 languages. Its first product, in January 2024, was a voice API for developers (Retell AI).

Retell AI pricing

Pay as you go: $0.07 to $0.31 a minute for voice agents, depending on the AI model, voice and phone line, and from $0.002 a message for chat agents. New accounts get $10 in free credits and 20 concurrent calls for free; extra concurrent calls cost $8 a month each, and enterprise plans are priced by contract (Retell AI).

Retell AI vs Vapi, Bland and Synthflow

Retell competes with other developer platforms for voice agents, such as Vapi, Bland and Synthflow, and publishes comparison pages against each, as well as against Decagon and Sierra. Brex said Retell “competes in a crowded and well-funded AI voice market” when it ranked it the fourth-fastest-growing software vendor of 2025, at +400% a year (Brex).

Who is the CEO of Retell AI?

Bing Wu, one of five co-founders. He spent about three years as a product manager at ByteDance and TikTok before starting Retell, which began as a live-dubbing tool for streamers and turned to AI phone calls during Y Combinator.

Bing Wu’s bio and contact routes: Retell AI CEO Bing Wu: email, LinkedIn and bio.

Where is Retell AI based, and how many employees does it have?

Redwood City, California, at 540 Price Avenue (Retell AI). The team works in the office by choice: “We work from Redwood City — not because remote doesn’t work, but because speed matters,” its careers page says, and it aims for more than $1 million of revenue per employee (Retell AI).

Y Combinator lists a team of 50 (Y Combinator), double the 25 people Retell had when it crossed $40 million in November 2025.

Key events

More on Retell AI and similar companies

• Retell AI CEO Bing Wu: from TikTok product manager to a $100M voice AI company

• AI voice companies: Retell’s category

• Fastest-growing SaaS companies: Retell and others by ARR growth

• Sierra dossier: the AI customer-service company Retell compares itself with

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