Volume

The problem

Companies record thousands of hours of customer calls, sales conversations and support sessions, but almost none of it is searchable. The insights buried in those recordings, such as frustrated customers, recurring feature requests and early signs of churn, rarely reach the people making product and strategy decisions. Teams rely on anecdotes from whoever happened to be on the call, which means the loudest voices often shape priorities.

Why now

Companies have recorded calls for years, but the cost and accuracy of transcription kept that audio locked away. Speech models improved dramatically, handling accents, crosstalk and background noise at a fraction of the previous cost. At the same time, customer experience became a board-level priority as acquisition costs rose and retention became the most efficient path to growth. Leaders wanted to understand customers at scale, and the raw material already existed in their recording archives. Volume turned a costly storage problem into a strategic asset just as companies started asking for it.

The founders

Hana Brooks built speech recognition models at a research lab, where she specialised in accents, background noise and overlapping speakers. Diego Serrano led support operations at a fast-growing marketplace and knew exactly how much valuable information disappeared when calls ended. They met when Diego was searching for a transcription vendor that could handle his team’s messy audio, and Hana’s prototype was the only one that worked.

Why we invested

Aria backed Volume at pre-seed because the founders understood both the model and the messy reality of a support floor. Many audio startups focus on transcription accuracy alone; Hana and Diego focused on what happens after the transcript exists, turning hours of audio into a short weekly brief that a product manager would actually read. Their early design partners were already forwarding those briefs to executives, which told us the product had found a real audience inside companies.

How we helped

We introduced Volume to heads of support and customer success across our portfolio, and several became early customers. Aria helped the founders tighten their positioning around churn prevention, which made the value easy to quantify. Our platform team also supported a privacy and compliance review that allowed Volume to sell into regulated industries such as insurance and healthcare.

Where they are now

Volume now turns call audio into searchable transcripts and weekly sentiment briefs for hundreds of companies. Customers use it to catch churn risks weeks earlier, route product feedback automatically to the right team and coach new support agents with real examples. The company recently launched live call guidance that suggests answers while agents are still on the line. Hana still listens to a random sample of calls every week to keep the models honest.