US-based speech recognition technology developer Deepgram received $25m yesterday in a series B round featuring subsidiaries of financial services firm Citi, enterprise software producer SAP and graphics processing unit (GPU) provider Nvidia.
Citi Ventures, SAP.io and Nvidia Inception GPU Ventures joined hedge fund manager Tiger Global Management, which led the round, as well as venture capital firm Wing VC.
Deepgram provides speech recognition software for enterprise customers that analyses the phonetic patterns of speech in order to better contextualise speech-to-text translation and avoid mistakes centred on homonyms: words pronounced identically that have different meanings.
Y Combinator and Metamorphic Ventures co-led the company’s $1.8m seed round in 2016, before Nvidia GPU Ventures added an undisclosed amount two years later. It then raised $12m in a March 2020 series A round led by Wing VC and backed by Nvidia, SAP.io, Y Combinator and Compound.
Jeff Herbst, head of Nvidia Inception GPU Ventures, said: “Deepgram is one of the early members of Inception, Nvidia’s virtual acceleration platform for AI startups.
“They have made significant contributions to the field of conversational intelligence, particularly as it relates to GPU-accelerated automated speech recognition, and we are delighted to extend our relationship with an additional financial investment.”
