Rime

Lily Clifford was a PhD student in Computational Linguistics at Stanford studying sociophonetics — the relationship between social factors and speech patterns — before dropping out to work on speech synthesis. Her research background directly shaped Rime's approach: rather than polished studio recordings, the company built its voice models on naturalistic, unselfconscious speech. She co-founded Rime in 2022 with Brooke Larson and Ares Geovanos, and the company secured a $5.5 million seed round from Unusual Ventures. Rime's technology is used in over 100 million monthly calls for enterprise clients including Domino's and Wingstop.

Brooke Larson holds a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Maryland (2013) and a BA in Linguistics and German from the University of Washington. After earning her doctorate she taught linguistics at the University of Iowa and Harvard, published research across multiple language families (Tagalog, Arabic, Russian, English), and worked at Google before joining Amazon as a Language Engineer for Alexa. She left Amazon to co-found Rime in 2022 with Lily Clifford and Ares Geovanos, contributing deep expertise in phonetics and speech data collection to the company's voice synthesis models.

Ares Geovanos is a Co-Founder of Rime with a background in engineering from Stanford and product development experience. Prior to co-founding Rime he worked on brain-computer interface research at UC San Francisco focused on restoring speech for people who had lost the ability to communicate verbally, giving him direct experience with the engineering challenges of voice reconstruction. He co-founded Rime in 2022 alongside Lily Clifford and Brooke Larson.