What Do AI Voice Agents and Self-Driving Cars Have in Common?

Imagine this: AI voice agents and self-driving cars are more alike than you think. Both require rigorous testing to ensure they perform flawlessly in real-world scenarios. Brooke Hopkins, a former tech lead at Waymo, is bringing her expertise in self-driving car evaluation to the world of AI voice and chat agents with her new startup, Coval.

“When I left Waymo, I realized a lot of these problems that we had at Waymo were exactly what the rest of the AI industry was facing,” Hopkins told TechCrunch. “But everyone was saying that this is a new paradigm, we’re having to come up with testing practices from first principles and that basically we all have to recreate everything. And I looked at that and said, wait, we’ve spent the last 10 years in self-driving figuring out how to do this.”

Brooke Hopkins, Founder of Coval

How Coval is Revolutionizing AI Agent Testing

In 2024, Hopkins launched Coval, a platform that builds simulations for AI voice and chat agents, testing and evaluating their performance in the same way she tested self-driving cars at Waymo. Coval can run thousands of simulations simultaneously, such as:

• Having the agent make a restaurant reservation
• Responding to a customer service question asked in an indirect way

Coval’s tech evaluates agents on a general set of metrics, but companies can also customize what they’re looking for and use Coval to continue evaluating for regressions. Users can take this data and the insights they glean from it to their end-customers, either for a demo or as a monitoring tool to show their customers the agent is working as intended.

Why Enterprises Need Coval

One of the biggest blockers to AI agents being adopted by enterprises is the lack of confidence in their performance. Hopkins explains:

“Choosing between vendors is a really complicated task for these executives because it’s just very hard to know what you even ask or how do you even prove that these agents are doing what you expect. And so this gives our companies the ability to really show that and demonstrate it.”

Brooke Hopkins

Coval’s Explosive Growth and Future Plans

Hopkins formulated the idea behind Coval during the Y Combinator Summer 2024 batch before launching the product publicly in October 2024. Demand has been strong and has become explosive in the last two months, with customers asking how quickly they can get their agents evaluated.

The San Francisco-based startup is now announcing a $3.3 million seed round led by MaC Venture Capital with participation from Y Combinator and General Catalyst. The startup will use the capital to build out its engineering team and work to achieve product-market fit. Hopkins added that the company will also be working toward enabling its users to evaluate other types of AI agents, like web-based agents, in the future.

The AI Agent Boom: Why Coval Stands Out

Coval enters the scene as momentum—and hype—around AI agents reaches an all-time high. Enterprise tech leaders like Marc Benioff have been praising (and marketing) the technology, with Salesforce planning to deploy more than a billion of its AI agents by next year. OpenAI is rumored to be releasing its take on an AI agent very soon, and numerous startups are building in the space.

With over 100 startups building AI agents across Y Combinator’s three 2024 cohorts alone, the competition is fierce. However, Hopkins believes Coval has a head start:

“I think where we really stand out is I’ve been working in this space for half a decade and I’ve built these systems over and over. We’ve built multiple iterations and we’ve seen how they fail and how they scale, and we’re building the same concepts into Coval and all of those learnings.”

Brooke Hopkins

The Future of AI Agent Evaluation

As the AI agent space continues to explode, companies will need robust tools to evaluate their agents’ performance. Coval is poised to lead the charge, offering a platform built on years of experience and proven methodologies. With its recent funding and growing demand, Coval is set to become the go-to solution for enterprises looking to confidently deploy AI agents.