Speech recognition platform Speechmatics raises €58.5M to understand every voice globally; here’s how

Cambridge-based Speechmatics, a speech recognition technology scale-up, announced on Tuesday that it has raised $62M (approximately €58.59M) in a Series B round of funding.

The round was led by Susquehanna Growth Equity with participation from existing investors AlbionVC and IQ Capital. As part of the deal, Jonathan Klahr, MD of Susquehanna Growth Equity, will join the Speechmatics board.

The company had raised £6M in its Series A round of funding in October, 2019.

Capital utilisation

Speechmatics says it will use the proceeds to support its aim of becoming a world-leading speech platform, understanding every voice with human-level accuracy. The company also wants to expand its services across the US and Asia-Pacific, improve infrastructure – particularly data centre capacity, and add further firepower to its R&D to deliver a more accurate understanding of even more voices.

Speechmatics CEO, Katy Wigdahl, says, “The patient capital will enable us to double down on our vision to close the gap between humanity and machines, which is incredibly exciting. We have a real heritage in speech technology combined with some of the world’s most talented speech and machine learning experts. We cannot wait to accelerate our growth and unlock the understanding of more and more voices.”

“Putting speech at the heart of communication”

Founded in 2006 by Katy Wigdahl, Speechmatics provides automatic speech recognition technologies that can be used anywhere, by anyone, in any language. The company’s speech recognition technology is used by enterprises in scenarios such as contact centres, CRM, consumer electronics, security, media & entertainment, and software.

Speechmatics’ goal is to comprehend every voice, independent of the speakers’ racial or ethnic background, age, gender, accent, or regional dialect. Historically, only a small subset of the most economically valuable speakers could achieve acceptable accuracy since training data had to be manually categorised, classed, or ‘labelled’.

However, after a major breakthrough in 2021, the company’s speech-to-text engine is now trained through exposure to hundreds of thousands of individual voices using millions of hours of unlabelled, more representative voice data that doesn’t require human intervention. This has made it possible for a paradigm shift in accuracy, especially for non-English languages, significantly lowering AI bias and voice recognition mistakes.

Based on datasets used in Stanford’s ‘Racial Disparities in Speech Recognition’ study, Speechmatics recorded an overall accuracy of 82.8 per cent for African American voices compared to Google (68.6 per cent) and Amazon (68.6 per cent). This level of accuracy equates to a 45 per cent reduction in speech recognition errors – the equivalent of three words in an average sentence.

For both live and recorded media, the Speechmatics engine already has 34 language support. Advanced punctuation and entity formatting (formatting of numbers, currencies, and addresses) are some of the capabilities offered by the company.

Many businesses benefit from its accuracy, including 3Play Media, Veritone, Deloitte UK, Vonage, and government agencies across the globe.

Speechmatics has offices in London, Boston, USA, Chennai, India and Brno, in the Czech Republic.

About the investors

Susquehanna Growth Equity (SGE) is an entrepreneur-centric growth equity fund with flexible capital and time horizons. The firm is exclusively focused on growth-stage internet, software, and information services companies. It has invested over $3B dollars in 70+ market-leading technology companies such as Credit Karma, HighRadius, iCIMS, and Payoneer over the last 16 years.

Jonathan Klahr says, “We started tracking Speechmatics when our portfolio companies told us that Speechmatics win on accuracy against all the other options including those coming from ‘Big Tech’ players. We are primed to work with the team to ensure that more companies can get exposed to and adopt this superior technology.”

AlbionVC supports visionary founders with long-term capital and scale-up expertise. It partners with UK early-stage B2B software and healthcare companies. The firm manages $1B of venture funds, currently invested in over 50 companies.

Robert Whitby-Smith, Partner at AlbionVC, says, “Our view is voice will become the increasingly dominant human-machine interface and Speechmatics are the category leaders in applying deep learning to speech, with category-defining accuracy and understanding across industry use-case and requirements. We have witnessed the impressive growth of the team and product over the last few years since our Series A investment in 2019 and as responsible investors we are delighted to support the company’s inclusive mission to understand every voice globally.”

IQ Capital is a deeptech venture capital firm. Based in London and Cambridge, the firm backs early-stage deeptech businesses that use ‘hard-to-replicate’ technology across sectors including software, hardware, materials, health tech, and life sciences. Its initial investments at Seed and Series A range from £0.5M to £10M, with the capacity for follow-on investment up to £30M through its own Growth Fund.