BBland AI

Bland says its AI phone agents handle more than 3.5 million calls a week for over 250 enterprise customers, including Samsara, Kin Insurance and CNO Financial Group. The San Francisco company builds voice agents that make and answer phone calls for tasks such as lead qualification, appointment booking, customer service and transfers to human staff.

Unlike many voice AI vendors, Bland runs its agents on its own in-house speech and language models and does not let customers plug in OpenAI or Anthropic models, which it presents as a security and latency advantage.

How It Works

Teams design an agent’s conversation flow, connect it to phone numbers and give it tools that call outside systems during a conversation, such as checking an account or booking a slot. Bland’s newer Agents builder adds separate staging and production environments plus evaluations that can block a release if test calls fail. Developers work through an API, a CLI, an MCP server and Norm, a build assistant that can also plug into coding agents. Calls can be inbound or outbound, and the company says its infrastructure supports multilingual conversations at large volume.

For sensitive deployments, Bland offers self-hosting, and it reports SOC 2, HIPAA eligibility, GDPR and PCI DSS compliance. A BAA, SSO, warm transfers and SMS or web chat are reported to be Enterprise-only.

Pricing

Bland’s self-serve plans are usage-based. Third-party breakdowns from September and October 2026 report a free Start plan at $0.14 per connected minute with caps of 100 calls a day and 10 concurrent calls, a Build plan at $0.12 per minute plus $299 a month with 2,000 daily calls, and a Scale plan at $0.11 per minute plus $499 a month. Enterprise pricing is custom, with volume discounts. Transfer time, outbound minimums and SMS are reported to cost extra.

What to Watch Out For

Reviewers describe a real learning curve: good results depend on careful conversation design and testing, so teams without engineering support may struggle. Several features buyers expect, including warm transfers and a BAA, sit behind an Enterprise contract. Native help desk integrations are reported to be thin, so connecting systems like Zendesk takes custom work. Bland reportedly changed its builder in September 2026 and asked customers to migrate production agents by November 15, 2026, so check what that means for existing flows.

Recent News

Bland raised a $50 million Series C led by Dell Technologies Capital in June 2026, taking total funding past $100 million. That followed a $40 million Series B led by Emergence Capital announced in February 2025.