Speechmatics to extend voice biometrics, speech recognition accuracy with $62M funding round

Voice biometrics and speech recognition provider Speechmatics has raised $62 million in a Series B funding round led by Susquehanna Growth Equity with participation from existing investors AlbionVC and IQ Capital.

As part of the investment, Jonathan Klahr, managing director of Susquehanna Growth Equity, will join the Speechmatics board.

“We chose to work with Susquehanna Growth Equity because they have a fantastic global footprint and a history of supporting significant growth in software businesses,” explains Speechmatics CEO Katy Wigdahl.

“The team is smart and ambitious but also pragmatic which is critical in this environment.”

Moving forward, Wigdahl said the company intends to use the funds to improve the accuracy of its algorithms regardless of speakers’ demographic, age, gender, accent, dialect, and location. The company says it has the most accurate and inclusive speech-to-text capability on the market.

“The patient capital will enable us to double down on our vision to close the gap between humanity and machines, which is incredibly exciting. The Speechmatics team is hugely ambitious,” Wigdahl adds.

Particularly, Speechmatics confirmed the funds will be invested in supporting expansion efforts across the U.S. and Asia-Pacific, improving data center capacity and other infrastructure, and adding further firepower to research and development.

At the time of writing, the Speechmatics engine is capable of recognizing 34 languages for both live and pre-recorded media and is currently used by various firms, including 3Play Media, Veritone, Deloitte UK, and Vonage.

“We have a real heritage in speech technology combined with some of the world’s most talented speech and machine learning experts,” Wigdahl explains.

“We cannot wait to accelerate our growth and unlock the understanding of more and more voices.”

The $62 million investment comes almost a year after Speechmatics first developed a speech recognition model that improves accuracy in understanding groups that have typically been challenging for natural language processing (NLP) systems.

More recently, the company was mentioned in the FT 1000 list as one of Europe’s fastest-growing startups from 2017 to 2020.

Even amongst a series of major biometrics funding announcements over the past couple of years, Speechmatics’ stands out as one of the largest in the voice space.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  funding  |  investment  |  research and development  |  speech recognition  |  Speechmatics  |  voice biometrics