Nagish becomes Rylo and raises $85 million for AI call captioning

Why it matters

Rylo's round shows investors are willing to fund AI accessibility products when the wedge is a regulated, daily-use utility rather than a generic transcription feature.

Tomer Aharoni, co-founder and CEO of the accessibility communications service formerly known as Nagish, announced on June 9 that Nagish has rebranded as Rylo and raised $85 million in growth funding to expand beyond phone-call captioning.

Rylo said in a company post that the financing came from General Catalyst and Canaan and existing investors, bringing total funding to more than $100 million. A same-day post on X described the round as $75 million in growth funding led by General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund, plus $10 million from Canaan, Contour Ventures and Vertex Ventures. Rylo has not disclosed a valuation.

Rylo on X

The rebrand is more than a name change. Aharoni is trying to reposition Nagish, which began as a captioned phone and relay service, as a broader communications layer for Deaf and hard-of-hearing users across calls, in-person conversations and workplace settings. Rylo says the current Nagish app is becoming Rylo Phone, a rebuilt version of its IP CTS and IP Relay products.

From school project to regulated communications platform

Aharoni's origin story is central to the pitch. In the company post, he wrote that Nagish was first created as a school project in 2019, rebuilt in 2020 to address communication needs for the Deaf community during the pandemic, and rebuilt again by 2022 as demand grew. He wrote that the founders "never intended to make Nagish a company" and "just wanted to solve a problem that felt impossible to ignore."

That framing matters because Rylo is operating in a market where product polish is only one constraint. Captioned telephone and relay services sit inside a regulated accessibility infrastructure, and Rylo says its service is FCC-certified. Rylo's homepage describes Rylo Phone as a free call captioning and live transcription app for individuals with hearing loss in the United States, with transcripts saved locally on-device and no human assistants on calls.

The product claim Rylo is making is that AI can replace much of the latency, awkwardness and privacy tradeoff associated with traditional relay systems. Rylo says its rebuilt phone product has sub-50ms load and response time on interactions, improved captioning and text-to-speech accuracy, natural-sounding voices for non-verbal users, and an AI call layer that can provide call context, sentiment cues, tone detection and smart predictions. Those are Rylo's figures, not independently reported performance benchmarks.

The funding buys a wider surface area

Rylo's immediate product is still the phone. The homepage says users can keep an existing number or get a new one for calls and texts, choose to speak or type replies, pair with hearing aids, cochlear implants and Bluetooth headsets, customize caption styles, and use support for more than 50 languages with real-time auto-detection. Rylo also advertises a 4.7 rating with 2,900 reviews on its site.

The larger bet is that phone captioning becomes the wedge into a fuller communications platform. Rylo says Rylo Phone is rolling out now, while additional products for in-person and workplace conversations will ship over the next few weeks. That distinction is important: the broader suite is the strategy, but not all of it is available today.

For General Catalyst and Canaan, the appeal is a founder-led accessibility product with a regulated reimbursement path and a large claimed user need. Rylo cites more than 1 billion people worldwide living with hearing loss, a broad population figure that does not translate directly into Rylo's serviceable market. Rylo says thousands of people use its products today, but has not provided revenue, active-user retention, geographic mix or enterprise adoption.

The risk in moving from utility to platform

The best accessibility products often start as utilities: a user has an immediate problem, and the product either solves it or fails. Rylo's challenge is that turning a trusted utility into a platform can add complexity to a product category where reliability, privacy and speed matter more than feature count.

Aharoni is explicitly taking that step. In the announcement, Rylo positions itself as a "communication engine" for Deaf and hard-of-hearing people, not only a call-captioning app. That explains the timing of the rebrand: Nagish described the initial use case; Rylo gives Aharoni room to sell a larger system across calls, live transcription and work.

The financing gives Rylo more room to pursue that expansion, but it also raises the bar. The unanswered questions are the ones that determine whether Rylo remains a well-liked accessibility app or becomes infrastructure: how much of the AI system works under real call conditions, how Rylo maintains privacy as it adds contextual features, and whether users want workplace and in-person products from the same service they trust for phone calls.

For now, the verified news is narrower and still significant: Aharoni has taken a 2019 school project, turned it into an FCC-certified captioning and relay product, and attracted $85 million in growth capital to make Rylo the umbrella brand for what comes next.