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Brooke Hopkins, founder and CEO of Coval, announced a $28.2M Series A (reported…

Brief

Brooke Hopkins, founder and CEO of Coval, explains how her simulation and observability platform—used by Perplexity and Deepgram to process tens of millions of calls monthly—secured a $28.2M Series A (announced 2026-06-24). Drawing on Waymo evals infrastructure, she argues voice is the first productionized autonomous-agent interface and recounts a customer offering to pay before any code existed.

Why it matters

Brooke Hopkins, founder and CEO of Coval, announced a $28.2M Series A (reported 2026-06-24); Coval processes tens of millions of calls per month for customers including Perplexity and Deepgram.

Key details

  • Hopkins argues voice is the killer AI interface and the first productionized use case for autonomous agents, claiming evaluation infrastructure she led at Waymo proved transferable to voice agents.
  • She narrowed a broad 'evals' idea into a focused enterprise simulation and observability platform; a customer offered to pay before she had written a single line of code. Key interview timestamps: 01:16 (voice as interface), 05:44 (missing infra), 12:32 (Waymo lessons), 16:38 (product-market fit), 25:35 (leaving Waymo).
Source evidence

Brooke Hopkins (@bnicholehopkins) is the founder and CEO of @covaldev, a simulation and observability platform that helps enterprises test, monitor, and evaluate AI-powered voice agents at scale.

Coval works with customers like Perplexity and Deepgram to process tens of millions of calls per month and has just raised a $28.2M Series A.

Brooke sat down with @harjtaggar to talk about how leading evaluation infrastructure at Waymo turned out to be surprisingly transferable to voice agents, why voice is emerging as the first productionized use case for autonomous agents, and how she narrowed a broad evals idea into a focused enterprise platform—including the moment a customer offered to pay her before she'd written a single line of code.

01:16 — Why Voice Is the Killer AI Interface
02:37 — How Enterprises Are Adopting Voice
05:44 — The Missing Infrastructure for Voice
06:58 — Where Voice Agents Fail
12:32 — Lessons From Waymo
16:38 — What Product-Market Fit Actually Feels Like
18:20 — Why They Bet on Enterprise
25:35 — Leaving Waymo to Go Solo
29:02 — What's Next for Coval

Video