Speechmatics develops AI-driven speech-to-text engines that aim to understand speakers regardless of accent or speaking style. The company sells B2B via APIs and has a customer base of about 170, including what3words, 3Play Media, Veritone, Deloitte UK and Vonage. Its engine currently supports 34 languages and the team emphasizes work to reduce AI bias by training on millions of hours of data. Product moves include more open API tools and a drag-and-drop sampler to attract developers, and planned expansion into additional languages and use cases such as noisy motor-vehicle environments. Leadership recently shifted as founder Dr. Tony Robinson stepped back from an executive role and Katy Wigdahl serves as CEO. The company competes against large cloud providers and claims higher accuracy on diverse voices in independent tests. Speechmatics provides machine learning and automatic speech recognition solutions, with engines available in 29 languages delivered via cloud or on‑premises. Its technology is used for processing audio files, live subtitling in broadcast, and converting call-centre recordings to text. Led by CEO John Milliken, the company has a team of 50 across Cambridge (UK), Denver (USA), Brno (Czech Republic) and Chennai (India). On 25 October 2019 Speechmatics raised £6.35m in a Series A funding round led by AlbionVC, with participation from IQ Capital and several angel investors. The company intends to use the funds for global expansion and product development. Speechmatics builds automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems using deep neural networks and universal models that do not require per-use-case retraining. Its product portfolio includes cloud and on‑premise deployments and a 2016 AI framework called Auto‑Auto that enables rapid addition of languages (the company has released a new language roughly every two weeks). The firm serves use cases such as call-centre analytics, call compliance, subtitling, interview and lecture transcription, language assessment and content discovery, with customers including Cambridge English and Udemy. Speechmatics emphasizes higher accuracy versus major competitors, according to investors, and maintains a world-class R&D team led by founder and CTO Dr Tony Robinson and multiple PhD researchers. Financially, the company reports substantial growth over the past two years achieved entirely through cash flow; the new funding is intended to accelerate commercialisation and roll-out.

Total raised

$70M

Funding rounds

3

Latest round

Series B

Latest activity

Jun 2022