Bland, a voice artificial intelligence company, has raised $50 million in series C funding led by Dell Technologies Capital. The round included participation from HubSpot Ventures, Archerman Capital, Tribeca Venture Partners, Emergence Capital, Upfront Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, Y Combinator, and others. The funding brings Bland's total capital raised to more than $100 million. The company develops proprietary voice AI models designed for complex, unpredictable conversations that traditional phone systems cannot manage. Bland's technology replaces rigid scripts with models that maintain context throughout lengthy interactions and adapt in real time. By building models in-house, the company optimises for voice-specific challenges including latency, interruptions, and conversational continuity.

Pace raises $46 million Series B to build the next century of insurance. (May 27, 2026/Business Wire) Pace, the AI operations partner for the world's leading insurers, today announced its $46 million Series B, co-led by Thrive Capital and Sequoia Capital, with participation from Emergence Capital and Pruven Capital. Pace partners with several public insurers and brokers to provide its cutting-edge technology, including The Mutual Group, Newfront, Prudential, and WTW. Since launching last year, Pace has autonomously completed more than a quarter of a million critical insurance workflows with AI agents for the world's leading insurers. "At Pace, we are on a mission to insure more of the world's risk," said Jamie Cuffe, founder and CEO of Pace. "Closing the $9 trillion protection gap starts with AI-native operations and Pace agents are purpose built for that work." Pace will use this capital to help its customers scale their agentic workforce to tens of millions of operations tasks this year across the US, Europe and now globally. "At Thrive, there are two things that really matter to us when investing in a company: ideas whose time has come and people who are really well matched to the problems they're working on," said Philip Clark, partner at Thrive Capital. "We are in this really special moment where the most important high value parts of the knowledge economy are being augmented and automated to a significant degree by these models and Jamie is one of those people where you go in biased to saying yes." At Prudential, Pace automates thousands of hours of manual work across policy servicing and issuance for customer acquisition. In partnership with Ryze Claim Solutions, Pace resolves claim cycle times 30% faster, and at Convex US, AI agents speed up data ingestion for new business and renewals. "We're delighted to be partnering with Pace," said Terry Garrett, Head of Strategy and Operators, Risk & Brokering at WTW. "Our collaboration brings together shared ambition, complementary strengths, and a real commitment to doing things better - for our clients, colleagues, and the wider industry. This partnership will make a meaningful difference to our business model over the long term."