Acclaim Launches in U.S. with a Voice-First AI Platform

Acclaim, a developer of customer experience platforms for regulated industries, has formally entered the U.S. market. Formerly known as Aiphoria, Acclaim has designed voice-first artificial intelligence agents.

"The founding team at Acclaim has built a proven platform capable of serving 50 million users across some of the most demanding environments in financial services," Fred Fontes, a former chief customer officer at Replicant.ai, who joins Acclaim as its CEO, said in a statement. "Today, we take the next step in our company's evolution, expanding to the U.S. Acclaim is poised to fill the massive market need for automating customer experience with empathy via conversational AI agents at scale."

Acclaim's U.S. expansion is being fueled by a $34 million funding round led by Ratmir Timashev, co-founder of Veeam.

"Everyone is racing to deploy AI agents, yet no customer wakes up hoping to speak with a robot," Timashev said in a statement. "I'm invested in Acclaim because it closes that gap. Acclaim delights customers, accelerates sales, and safeguards compliance from day one. That's a rare and winning combination."

In addition to its U.S. market entry, Acclaim is increasing its investment in the Europe/Middle East/Africa region by appointing Paul Thomas, a former senior vice president and general manager at NiCE, as its senior vice president for EMEA.

"What impressed me immediately is the engineering discipline behind the founders and the broader technical team at Acclaim," Thomas said in a statement. "This isn't stitched-together automation. Acclaim's production-grade voice AI is built to operate under real compliance constraints and make a real impact on CX programs. This is critical as regional organizations face immense pressure to comply with the EU AI Act and other emerging regulations."

And in Latin America, Acclaim has appointed Fernando Bertolla, a former Salesforce vice president, as its regional vice president.