Lily Clifford is the CEO and Co-Founder of Rime, a San Francisco-based voice AI company building next-generation speech synthesis models for high-volume, real-time enterprise applications.

Lily studied Computational Linguistics at Stanford University, where she specialized in sociophonetics, before dropping out of her PhD program to co-found Rime in 2022.

Lily's deep background in sociolinguistics drives Rime's linguistics-first approach, training models on proprietary conversational data rather than internet-scraped audio to produce more natural, human-like voices.

She co-founded Rime alongside Brooke Larson, a former Amazon Alexa linguist, and Ares Geovanis, a Stanford engineer, establishing a recording studio in San Francisco to capture expressive, multilingual conversational speech at scale.

Under Lily's leadership, Rime now handles over 100 million calls per month for enterprise clients including Mayo Clinic, Domino's, Wingstop, Dialpad, and Asurion, and has raised $29.5M in total funding.