• AI voice agent startup Cekura has raised $2.4 million in seed funding, led by Y Combinator.
• Cekura fine-tunes AI agents in highly regulated spaces like health and finance.
• It sees a vast opportunity as call centers increasingly bend to AI.

Eight-month-old Cekura has raised a $2.4 million seed round led by Y Combinator to fine-tune AI voice agents.

Flex Capital, Hike Ventures, Pioneer Fund, and Decacorn participated in the round, as did angel investors Kulveer Taggar, Chris Smoak, Ooshma Garg, Richard Aberman, and JJ Fliegelman.

Cekura — a riff on the word secure, rebranded from Vocera in March — was founded by a trio of IIT Bombay grads in their twenties: Sidhant Kabra, Tarush Agarwal, and Shashij Gupta. The company has seven employees and expects to onboard three others next month.

Kabra told Business Insider the longtime friends were working on AI agents in the healthcare space and struggling with quality assurance (QA) amid manual fixes that could take hours.

Cekura uses AI to simulate conversations and generate thousands of edge-case scenarios to put AI agents through their paces before going live.

"The customers will interrupt you, the customers will be toxic, the customers will try to jailbreak you, the customers will operate out of bias," Kabra said. "You need to really stress test your agents before you go live."

After that, Cekura works to detect issues and can add new features so agents can assume more responsibilities.

As call centers shift to AI, Cekura sees vast opportunity. The company monetizes via a subscription model for startup clients, beginning at $1,000 per month. It also has custom enterprise offerings. While roughly 90% of its business is focused on voice agents, it also builds chat agents, Kabra said.

Competitors include fellow Y Combinator grads like Coval and Hamming. (Most recently, the famed accelerator's spring 2025 batch featured 70 startups focused on agentic AI — each of which received a $500,000 investment.)

Cekura has roughly 70 customers across industries — including in highly regulated spaces like healthcare and financial services, where "the threshold of reliability is pretty high," Kabra said.

Some of its clients include AI mortgage servicing startup Kastle and Sandra — an AI receptionist for car dealerships.

Here's a look at the pitch deck Cekura used to raise $2.4 million in seed funding. Some slides and details have been redacted in order to share the deck publicly.

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• Hank Faber has been a trucker for over 35 years.
• He turned to trucking after a series of bad weather forced him to sell his farms in the '80s.
• He still works part-time because he can't afford to retire and regrets selling the farms.

Hank Faber grips the handle of his 2009 Volvo with the practiced ease of a trucker who's maybe spent more time on the road than off it. He adjusts the seat, checks the mirrors, and starts the engine. For Faber, this truck isn't just transportation — it's the reason he can keep paying the bills.

Faber and his wife live paycheck-to-paycheck on his trucking income, their Social Security, and his wife's IRAs.

"I should be retired at my age," said Faber, who was 77 at the time of his interview with Business Insider in late 2024.

However, being self-employed most of his career, Faber never had a 401(k) and spent all his retirement savings years ago on a vacation spot in Kentucky.

"There were weeks when I drove a little less and my wife said, 'Hey, we're running short,'" Faber said, adding, "I've had to hit the road and go pick up two, three extra loads to finish out the month to raise my income."

At the time of his interview, Faber said his Volvo semi-truck, which he bought in 2009, had 999,740 miles on it. During his more than 35-year trucking career, Faber said he's driven over 4 million miles accident-free, earning him the Landstar Roadstar award for safety and professionalism.

He'll probably keep driving for as long as his health allows. "If my health would not allow me to truck, that would change our income drastically," he said.

Faber's situation is not uncommon. According to a BofA survey last year, an increasing number of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. The survey found that 25% of households spend over 95% of their monthly incomes, leaving little left for savings.

Faber's big regret

Faber and his wife have about $6,000 in expenses each month. They haven't taken any big vacations in years, only go out to eat a couple of times a month, and their medical bills are largely covered by insurance, Faber said. Much of their expenses are paying back loans.

"I had to refinance my house when we got in financial trouble back about 15 years ago," Faber said, adding that "in 2020, we managed to refinance at an interest rate under 3%. If we don't miss a payment, the house would be paid off when we're 99 years old."

In addition to home payments, Faber said he has land and car payments. He's also paying back a $18,000 loan on his truck he had to take out when it broke down about three years ago. He said he was nearly finished paying it off at the time of the interview.

"If I could change things, I would have just stayed on the farm," he said.

Faber's farm

Before trucking, Faber said he owned a couple of farms in Indiana with 208 acres. He and his wife grew corn, soybeans, and wheat and raised sheep. In the mid-80s, though, misfortune struck two years in a row.

The first year, drought robbed them of their crops. "We had to take out federal crop insurance to protect us," Faber said. The Farmer's Home Administration gave him a loan with 13.75% interest, he said.

In the second year, a major hailstorm damaged their crops again. Unable to pay down the loan, it kept growing.

"It became $147,000. We could not keep going," Faber said. "So the farm was sold for $50,000. It was such a small amount, it didn't cover the mortgage. We lost money on that and still had to pay off the property tax," he said.

Looking back, Faber said they should have tried harder to stay because the farmland would be worth a lot more today. "If we could have managed to keep it, I would've been probably retired years ago."

After they left the farm, Faber began trucking.

Faber never had a 401(k)

Faber said he used to make well over $100,000 a year gross when he was driving a semi full-time, but after expenses like taxes, permits, and meals, he only had about a third of that left. "It's quite expensive," he said.

Being self-employed, Faber never had a 401(k) with any employee matching to help him grow a nest egg for retirement. However, "I did have a program where I put a small amount away a month for about 10 years," he said.

He cashed in all of that money, though, to buy a vacation spot in Kentucky. "We bought this lot with a trailer house, screened-in porch, and a boat," he said, adding, "Because I spent it all, I don't have any retirement funds put away at all."

So, Faber plans to keep driving for as long as his health allows. Hank has chronic lymphocytic leukemia, CLL, but it hasn't required treatment in the nine years he's had it, he said.

One day, he hopes to be financially stable enough that he can sell the truck and take a river cruise through Europe. "I would like to go to Portugal and the Czech Republic and stuff and take a cruise like the Viking cruise or something for my retirement."

This story was adapted from Hank Faber's interview for Business Insider's series "Life Lessons." Learn more about Swanagan's story and others' in the video below:

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• Some of the country's tech leaders have invested in doomsday preparations, like bunkers.
• Executives at some luxury bunker companies said interest spiked during the Israel-Iran conflict.
• Here are some of the wealthiest tech leaders who are said to have invested in apocalypse prep.

In times of geopolitical chaos, the average person might watch a meditation video or stock up on canned goods. The wealthiest among us, however, might turn to a luxury underground bunker instead.

"When a war breaks out, or when America bombs Iran, it does cause a spike in our business," Ron Hubbard, founder and CEO of Atlas Survival Shelters, told BI.

Larry Hall, the owner of luxury bunker company Survival Condo, also said he's seen increased interest during geopolitical conflicts, including the recent one between Israel and Iran.

Hubbard said it's safe to assume that most billionaires have some sort of shelter, though relatively few have extremely extravagant bunkers that cost tens of millions of dollars. Hall said he's built a bunker complex with a swimming pool, and others have included a shooting range or bowling alley. He said he's currently negotiating bunker sales between $1 million and $2 million.

As Hall sees it, bunkers have become a "new status symbol of the elite" in the post-pandemic era, while the topic used to be more taboo.

Some of the country's biggest tech names have hopped on the prepper trend in the last decade, buying underground shelters and collections of guns.

LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman told the New Yorker in 2017 that he thinks more than half of his Silicon Valley billionaire peers have bought some sort of end-of-world hideout.

Here are some of the tech millionaires and billionaires who have invested in doomsday planning.

Bunkers — or similar tunnels or shelters

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg hasn't confirmed reports that he has a survival bunker, but said on a recent episode of the podcast "This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von" that he has an "underground tunnel" at his ranch in Hawaii.

In 2023, Wired reported that Zuckerberg was building a 5,000-square-foot underground shelter at the ranch. A year later, local news outlet Hawaii News Now reported that county planning documents included a "storm shelter" measuring almost 4,500 square feet.

Zuckerberg also downplayed the bunker reports during an interview with Bloomberg in December, comparing the space to "a basement."

"There's just a bunch of storage space and like, I don't know, whatever you want to call it, a hurricane shelter or whatever," he said. "I think it got blown out of proportion as if the whole ranch was some kind of Doomsday bunker, which is just not true."

A representative for Zuckerberg directed BI to his comments to Bloomberg.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has also denied having a bunker, saying instead that he has "structures." He didn't share details of the structures at a WSJ Tech Live event in 2023, but did note that none of them would be helpful if artificial intelligence "goes wrong." He also told the New Yorker in 2016 that he has a plot of land in Big Sur, California, that he could fly to if necessary.

PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel attempted to build a 10-bedroom compound in New Zealand, but the local government rejected his plans after environmentalists complained. Some suspected that parts of the estate were meant to be a doomsday bunker.

Hall told BI that he's been "flabbergasted" by some of the reported shelter locations, since California and New Zealand are near active tectonic plate boundaries.

"They're the two places you don't want to be building bunkers, and yet allegedly these billionaires are building in those two places," he said.

Representatives for Altman and Thiel did not respond to BI's request for comment.

Other preparations include guns and surgery

Some opt for different doomsday preparations. Altman also previously told the New Yorker that he has "guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force."

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told the New Yorker he's bought guns, ammo, and motorcycles. And he's taken it one step further — he said that in 2015, he got laser eye surgery to hopefully better his chances of survival.

Interest in doomsday-esque materials doesn't just extend to those who are preparing for the end of the world.

Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus and Anduril, hasn't referred to himself as a prepper but he owns a sizable collection of older military-grade vehicles. He said on an episode of Bloomberg's "The Circuit" that he also owns decommissioned missile silos, some of which extend underground, where he stores what he says is the world's largest video game collection.

"I put that in one of my missile bases, 200 feet underground," Luckey told Bloomberg's Emily Chang. Representatives for Luckey and Huffman did not respond to BI's request for comment.

Hall said that he thinks the association with prominent tech leaders has helped his business.

"A lot of people like to live vicariously through what other people do," he said.

• I wasn't prepared for how my husband's deployment would impact my daughters.
• When her dad isn't around, giving my eldest a sense of control and predictability helps.
• Other things that have helped her cope are a new daddy doll, Toniebox, and video recordings of him.

At first, my husband cringed at the idea of a "daddy doll."

"A pillow with my face on it? That's pretty weird," he said. "Do you really think she needs that?"

After one of his pre-deployment training trips, however, it became clear that we needed some tools to help my eldest daughter, who is almost 3, cope with the challenges of military life.

My husband is an integral part of our family's daily routines.

When he's home, he typically wakes the kids up in the morning, feeds them breakfast, and takes them to day care. In the evening, we have dinner together and then often "divide and conquer" for bedtime, with my husband taking on the toddler duties while I take care of the infant.

This dynamic has served our family well and has allowed my daughters and husband to form a special bond. Unfortunately, though, it creates a void when he leaves, and my attention is split in two.

We've found coping strategies in his absence

Enter the daddy doll, or the "dada pillow" as my toddler calls it — the newest staple in our household.

When my husband is gone for months at a time with limited communication, the dada pillow serves as a huggable reminder of his role in our home. It joins us for meals, playtime, and nightly snuggles.

It doesn't solve all of our problems, but the daddy doll has definitely taken some of the sting out of my husband's absence. It's a way for my kids to include him in our day-to-day activities, making him feel closer to us.

We also purchased a customizable Tonie for our Toniebox and loaded recordings of my husband singing songs and reading books onto it. My daughter loves listening while she colors and does crafts. I have a few videos of him on my phone and iPad, too, that we all love watching when we miss him the most.

Deployments have always been hard, but I couldn't have anticipated how much more difficult it would be to navigate these transitions with my kids.

In addition to the physical tools (we also read deployment picture books and use a visual calendar that counts down the days to his return), the following realizations have allowed me to better handle the uncertainties of deployment:

Prepare for increased tantrums and choose your battles wisely

Recently, my eldest threw a fit because I wouldn't let her hold the big bag of Cheetos.

I've learned that often, these explosive emotions arise due to a desire for control in a very unpredictable situation.

My daughter is too young to understand why her dad left and how long he will be gone. All she knows is that he was present every day, and suddenly, he isn't.

So, understandably, she wants to control as much as she can in this highly sensitive state, which means more meltdowns.

I tend to loosen the reins and give in to smaller arguments just to keep the peace in our home until we settle into a new rhythm without Dad.

Expect setbacks

We attempted to potty train my daughter before my husband deployed, but with him being in and out of the house so much, that proved impossible.

The inconsistency in our home environment made it difficult to integrate new skills. Again, my daughter sought control and stability, leading to my next tip.

Keep routines as consistent as possible

When Dad is gone, we still do all of the things that he and my toddler did together—even the most insignificant things, like letting her "help" feed the dog in the morning.

These tiny rituals give her a sense of predictability and groundedness. I've also found that keeping the weekly schedule consistent and avoiding trips in the first weeks of deployment helps.

Give extra cuddles and one-on-one time when you can

As a mom of two little ones and a third on the way, I know how difficult it can be to carve out one-on-one time.

However, since my eldest daughter is accustomed to more individual attention from her dad, I've found that even just a few extra minutes of cuddling together at night helps regulate her nervous system and keeps the big emotions at bay.

Overall, I try to have more patience and compassion for myself and my kids when my husband is gone. We're all going through this thing together, which is easy to forget during those intense moments when everyone is screaming and needing something.

On days when I'm feeling extra discouraged and depleted, I sneak a hug from the dada pillow and remind myself that we're all doing our best.

• Recent college grads face a long wait to be able to afford buying a home, according to an analysis by Mortgage Research Network.
• High home prices, student loan payments, and low starting salaries make it an uphill battle.
• Sacrifices like living with parents and cutting expenses are almost necessary to become a homeowner.

Recent college graduate Amrita Bhasin wants to own property badly.

She was inspired by her parents, immigrants from England and India who bought a property in the late '90s in Menlo Park, California, which is part of Silicon Valley.

Bhasin declined to share what her parents paid for their San Francisco area property, but according to SiliconValleyMLS.com, the median price for a home in Menlo Park in 1998 was $595,000. Today, the median price of a home in that neighborhood is $3.35 million.

"I think that made me realize that having property is the biggest asset you can have," Bhasin told Business Insider.

Bhasin, 24, graduated from UC Berkeley in 2023 and has since been looking to buy a home without much luck. During the fall of 2024, she moved in with her parents to save money, at the expense of her social life.

Bhasin, who has experience working for Big Tech, now runs her own software startup, which sometimes requires commuting to San Francisco, a city she'd like to spend more time in.

"I can't stay out late," she said. "My friends who live in San Francisco can just casually hang out with each other without much of a heads-up. For me, it's like an hour to get up to the city — you need to give a heads-up."

Bhasin is taking matters into her own hands to try to save for a home, but data shows that for recently graduated Gen Zers, aggressive saving still might not help.

The class of 2025 won't be able to comfortably buy until 2034

Due to the many factors working against them, first-time homebuyers are typically older than they used to be. According to the National Association of Realtors, the median age of a first-time buyer was 38 in 2024. In the 1980s, buyers were often in their late 20s.

And now the average college graduate from the class of 2025 won't be able to afford a home until 2034. That's according to an analysis from Mortgage Research Network, released in May.

The analysis estimated how long it would take to save for a 10% down payment in each state, factoring in home prices, average student loan balances and payments, and starting salaries for recent graduates in each state, using data from Zillow, EducationData.org, and the US Census Bureau.

The timeline to buy varies significantly by state, the study found. Hawaii had the longest average timeline at 17.8 years, while West Virginia had the shortest at 4.9 years.

Tim Lucas, lead analyst and editor at Mortgage Research, highlighted Florida as an interesting case because it's normally thought of as an affordable place to live. The average home price is just over $400,000; however, average starting salaries — $58,009 — are below the national average of $64,598, according to Mortgage Research.

"Yes, the home prices are reasonably affordable, like $400,000 per our data, but you have lower starting salaries and higher student debt, so that offsets any kind of affordability," Lucas told BI.

Gen Z mostly wants to live where the jobs are, but that's expensive

Bhasin has friends in San Francisco who pay up to $3,500 a month in rent, she said, but that's the price of living in the city.

Christopher Tyson, president of the National Community Stabilization Trust, said the city is a popular place for recent graduates.

"If you're in DC, or San Francisco, or Los Angeles, or New York, this is where the entry-level jobs are — but they're also extremely inflated, hyperinflated markets," Tyson told BI.

"You could be making a good salary, but still not be able to afford rent," he continued. "And if you want to put yourself on a path to purchase, you may have to live with a parent or whatnot."

Tyson noted that it's not easy for a lot of people to afford buying a home right now, but it's especially hard for younger generations just starting careers with no equity and little savings. To build up that buying power, sacrifices might have to be made.

Bhasin lives at home, rarely eats out, and quit drinking all to help save for a home, sacrifices she believes are necessary to get what she wants: a home in California.

About 40% of 18- to 30-year-olds lived with at least one parent in 2023, and according to an April Pew Research Center analysis, Vallejo, California, in the Bay Area, had the highest percentage of 25- to 34-year-olds living with their parents at 33%.

"I just got into that mode of, 'I want to be an adult,' and I want to make sacrifices and I want to be the healthiest version of myself and set myself up on the path of my dreams," Bhasin said.

"I do want to buy something in my 20s before I hit 30 because if I've saved appropriately, I should be able to," she added. "I don't want to be 35 and be still saving up for a home."

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"What he really wants is to be part of a family, a place to stretch out, get some treats, and just be loved for who he is," the shelter said.

• Kristin Lewis designs products at Aura, a digital security company.
• She was surprised when her 7-year-old managed to make an unauthorized purchase.
• That led to a more open dialogue and weekly tech check-ins with her kids.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Kristin Lewis, senior vice president of product at Aura, a company with a suite of products intended to help people stay safe online. It has been edited for length and clarity.

A lot of my work is about simplifying online safety, so I used to be pretty confident in my ability to keep my kids safe online. Then, my son made a purchase online that showed me keeping kids safe isn't so simple, even for an expert.

My sons are young — they're 5 and 8 now — and they don't have their own devices, only a family iPad. My husband and I download apps that we are comfortable with them using, and are often nearby when the boys are on the iPad.

I thought we were doing everything parents should. Then I learned that kids can unintentionally stumble into trouble online, even with their parents right there.

My son made an unauthorized purchase within an app

My rude awakening happened on a Saturday morning. I was doing Wordle, and my son Warner, who was then 7, was playing on the iPad. He had recently visited his 10-year-old cousin and had since been playing some parent-approved online games with him. I love that they can connect over distance like that.

Then, I received a push notification on my phone, telling me my card had been used to make a gaming transaction on the iPad. I looked at Warner and asked if he had bought something, and he replied, "Why do you ask?"

So many things were going off in my head, but I didn't want Warner to think he was in trouble. I asked him to show me the game, and he told me he was chatting with his cousin. When I looked at the screen, it was a random stranger, not his cousin's screen name. The stranger had sent him a link. Warner clicked it and made a purchase for the game.

I immediately talked with Warner and locked down messaging

The whole interaction was relatively innocuous. The stranger hadn't said anything inappropriate, and it didn't seem to be a scam. But I was struck by everything that could have happened.

I sat down with Warner and explained that he wasn't talking to his cousin. When I said that, he looked scared and asked, "Well, who is it?" I told him it could be anyone, emphasizing that while many people online are nice, others are not, so it's important to avoid talking to strangers. Then, I disabled in-app messaging, which I hadn't realized was allowed.

I'd underestimated my son's tech capabilities

That morning made me realize that I need to talk to my sons about online safety before I think they need it. Kids are naturally curious and trusting, which can be a dangerous combination online.

I hadn't considered that as Warner quickly improved his reading skills, he'd be able to explore more on the iPad. He was a lot more tech savvy than I gave him credit for.

Like most parents, I don't have the time to research every app my kids want to use. That's why the work I do at Aura is so important to me. I want to take some of the burden of safety online off parents. I would love to have more of those decisions made for me—and my team is working toward that at Aura. But for now, there's still a lot of groundwork parents need to put in.

I want to keep a positive outlook on technology with my sons

While this experience was jarring, I don't want the message to be that technology is bad. That's not the approach we use in our house. Instead, we have weekly tech check-ins where we get curious about what the kids are doing online. What games did they win, or which cousins did they catch up with? If they want a new app, we can look into it together.

Most of our family lives far away, so technology has been a great bridge to build connections. Warner's cousin always Facetimes him when he walks the dog, and the two virtually walk together. That type of interaction online is always OK. Other interactions, like gaming, are limited.

It's similar to snacking. The boys can't always have Doritos, but they can have a banana any time they like. They can't always play games, but they can answer FaceTime from family any time. I hope to empower them to make their own healthy decisions as they grow up.