Speechmatics, the world’s leading speech recognition technology firm, raises c.£50m

The Series B funding, led by Susquehanna Growth Equity with participation from existing investors Albion Capital and IQ Capital, will be used to support the firm’s vision to be a world-leading speech platform, understanding every voice with human-level accuracy.

Global experts in deep learning and speech recognition, Speechmatics has built the most accurate and inclusive speech-to-text engine available. Its engine already understands 34 languages for live and pre-recorded media. Industry-leading features include advanced punctuation and entity formatting (formatting of numbers, currencies, and addresses). Organisations ranging from Veritone, Deloitte UK, and Vonage to government departments across the world already take advantage of its accuracy.

Speechmatics is headquartered in Cambridge, UK with offices in London, Boston, USA, Chennai, India and Brno, in the Czech Republic. The investment will be used to support global expansion across the United States and Asia-Pacific, improving infrastructure and adding further firepower to its research and development to deliver even more accurate understanding of even more voices. 

Katy Wigdahl, CEO, Speechmatics, said: 

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. 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.

 

Robert Whitby-Smith, Partner at Albion Capital, said: 

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.