This Startup Built the Infrastructure Powering Voice AI

ℹ️ EPISODE INFO

Released

March 5, 2026

Duration

53m

Channel

YC Root Access

Watch on YouTube

▶ Open ↗

📝 EPISODE DESCRIPTION

In this episode of Founder Firesides, YC Managing Partner Jared Friedman talks to Dylan Fox, the Founder of Assembly AI (S17), which has raised $160M to date. AssemblyAI is the voice AI infrastructure platform powering 10,000 companies, including Granola, Zoom and Delta Airlines. https://www.assemblyai.com/ Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs Chapters: 02:08 - What AssemblyAI actually does 05:23 - Dylan learns to code and discovers ML 07:11 - The Amazon Echo moment 09:32 - Why Dylan built voice AI infrastructure 13:02 - Building AI before anyone cared 16:50 - The 2021 inflection point 24:13 - Real-time voice agents are here 28:26 - Inside AssemblyAI’s new voice models 45:33 - Lessons from hypergrowth 52:00 - The future of voice AI

🎤 SPEAKERS

• Jared Friedman

  host

  YC partner and host of YC Root Access who interviews founders about their startups and technology.

• Dylan Fox

  guest

  Founder/CEO of AssemblyAI, building infrastructure and models for speech recognition and voice AI applications.

🧾 EPISODE SUMMARY

In this episode of YC Root Access, featuring Jared Friedman and Dylan Fox, This Startup Built the Infrastructure Powering Voice AI explores AssemblyAI built voice infrastructure enabling real-time agents and audio understanding AssemblyAI provides voice AI infrastructure—APIs and models—used by products like note takers, contact centers, and emerging real-time voice agents at massive scale.

🔗 RELATED EPISODES

The Q/A Layer for the AI Coding Era

Senator Scott Wiener Press Conference at YC

This Is The Next Industry AI Will Disrupt

AI-Powered Revenue is Here

Rebuilding Customer Support for the AI Era

This AI Startup Is Taking Over Phone Sales