Deepgram, a speech recognition company offering enterprises to build analytical insights from their audio data with highest accuracy and affordability has raised $12M in Series A round. The funding round was led by Wing Venture Capital with help from Y Combinator, Nvidia GPU Ventures and SAP.io.
Deepgram went through seed round in early 2016 and also had a venture round from September 2016 till March 2018 as per CrunchBase Financials data. Overall, the total funding amount raised so far is $13.9M.
Deepgram’s product also called Deepgram MissionControl works in three steps. In first step (DataFactory module), it allows enterprises to prepare their data by uploading and labeling it. In 2nd step (ModelForge module), it allows customers to build and train custom models and in the final step, enterprises can transcribe their bulk audio data using their custom models. Deepgram claims to offer more features than Google, Amazon, Nuance and IBM. Make sure to give them a try.
What’s the money for? Adding staff, among other things. Deepgram has about 40 people today, but declined to tell TechCrunch how quickly it will scale personnel (oddly, as that’s a pretty standard question), saying instead that it’s hiring aggressively, with a focus on go-to-market and engineering. The firm also intends to use some of its Series A on hardware.
TechCrunch spoke with Deepgram CEO Scott Stephenson about his company’s product during our call about the round itself. Summarizing our chat, here’s what we found out. Instead of trying to improve existing tech — which doesn’t sport strong gross margins, the CEO said — Deepgram started from scratch, building a deep learning tool that, after a few years’ work, was a step ahead of other speech recognition technologies in terms of accuracy.
Its investors agree. In a call with TechCrunch, Nvidia’s Jeff Herbst, who took part in the investment, said that Deepgram was “one of the best, if not the best” speech recognition companies around. Deepgram provides its services in two ways, hosted on its own hardware (the firm claims better margins by running its own metal, and, you now know why Nvidia is involved) and on-prem on client hardware. The startup is targeting enterprise call centers and voice platforms as customers.
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