Uploaded June 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
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: ycombinator.com/apply
Work at a startup: ycombinator.com/jobs
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: ycombinator.com/apply
Work at a startup: ycombinator.com/jobs
