Speech AI Startup AssemblyAI Raises $50M
Speech AI startup AssemblyAI has raised $50 million in a Series C funding round led by Accel. AssemblyAI and its voice AI services have expanded into generative AI and large language models (LLMs) this year, with its speech AI models fueling new voice-driven apps and products.
AssemblyAI
AssemblyAI offers advanced AI-driven speech recognition services and models. The company pitches its models as potentially able to outperform human capabilities in terms of accuracy and speed for transcription and understanding. Most recently, AssemblyAI released its Conformer-2 model, which is now powering third-party voice products thanks to significant robustness improvements in noisy environments. AssemblyAI said surging customer adoption signals a widening enterprise appetite for weaving speech capabilities into workflows. Its API fields over 25 million calls daily from fast-scaling startups across sectors.
“We founded AssemblyAI with the vision of creating superhuman Speech AI models that would unlock an entirely new class of AI applications to be built leveraging voice data,” AssemblyAI CEO Dylan Fox wrote in a blog post. “Over the past two years, we’ve seen the combination of bigger datasets, better compute, and new neural network architectures like the Transformer make possible the significant advancement of AI models across nearly every modality — and make our vision of building superhuman Speech AI models more achievable than ever before.”
AssemblyAI’s new funding nearly doubles the amount raised by the four-year-old startup to $115 million. The startup is working on a next-generation multilingual model trained on over 10 million voice data hours and expects it to set new accuracy benchmarks when launched soon. AssemblyAI’s AI models focus on speech for transcription, speaker identification, summarization, and moderation. The company counts the likes of meeting transcription service Fireflies.ai and conversational data collector Tyepform among its customers.
“While we’re very proud of the progress we’ve made over the last two years — it’s very much still Day 1 for us and we know there’s a lot of work ahead,” Fox wrote. “This new capital will support our ambitious research plans, new model development, training compute, market expansion, as well as help us build our team. We believe that the best way for us to continue to innovate is to bring together some of the best minds in AI, and we’re proud to have had an impressive roster of research leaders and scientists from DeepMind, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta join us over the past year.”
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