What It Actually Takes to Deploy a Voice Agent to a Fortune 500

Brooke Hopkins is the founder and CEO of Coval (S24), a simulation and observability platform for voice agents that helps enterprises test, monitor, and evaluate AI-powered phone systems at scale — working with customers like Perplexity and Deepgram to process tens of millions of calls per month — and has just raised a $28.2M Series A. In this fireside, Brooke sat down with Harj Taggar, Managing Partner at YC to talk about how her years building evaluation infrastructure and developer tools at Waymo turned out to be surprisingly transferable to the world of voice agents, why voice is emerging as the first truly productionized use case for autonomous agents, and what it took to go from a broader evals idea to a deeply focused enterprise platform — including the moment a customer offered to pay her before she'd written a single line of code. https://www.coval.dev Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs

Harj TaggarhostBrooke Hopkinsguest

Jun 24, 202630mWatch on YouTube ↗

EPISODE INFO

Released: June 24, 2026
Duration: 30m
Channel: YC Root Access
Watch on YouTube: ▶ Open ↗

EPISODE DESCRIPTION

Brooke Hopkins is the founder and CEO of Coval (S24), a simulation and observability platform for voice agents that helps enterprises test, monitor, and evaluate AI-powered phone systems at scale — working with customers like Perplexity and Deepgram to process tens of millions of calls per month — and has just raised a $28.2M Series A. In this fireside, Brooke sat down with Harj Taggar, Managing Partner at YC to talk about how her years building evaluation infrastructure and developer tools at Waymo turned out to be surprisingly transferable to the world of voice agents, why voice is emerging as the first truly productionized use case for autonomous agents, and what it took to go from a broader evals idea to a deeply focused enterprise platform — including the moment a customer offered to pay her before she'd written a single line of code. https://www.coval.dev Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs

SPEAKERS

Harj Taggar
host
Partner at Y Combinator and host of YC Root Access.
Brooke Hopkins
guest
Founder and CEO of Coval, focused on simulation/evaluation for production voice agents.

EPISODE SUMMARY

In this episode of YC Root Access, featuring Harj Taggar and Brooke Hopkins, What It Actually Takes to Deploy a Voice Agent to a Fortune 500 explores scaling enterprise voice agents with simulation, evaluation, and observability infrastructure Coval provides simulation and observability so companies can test voice agents at scale before exposing real customers and monitor behavior across tens of millions of production calls.

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