INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Deepgram, a startup focused on high-quality, real-time speech recognition, announced a $12 million Series A this morning.
The startup,
founded a half decade ago, according to Crunchbase data, with just a few million in raised capital, is interesting, as its success to date
was founded on two consecutive experiments
The first dealing with its technology, and the second concerning its market.
Deepgram sits in the midst of our continuing conversation
about AI-grounded companies, or at least companies that make use of deep learning
Let explore its round, and how the company got to where it is today.
Foundations
Speech recognition has come a long way since terrible &90s
headsets and trying to train Dragon Naturally Speaking to better let you dictate into Word documents
Startups like Otter.ai have taken speech recognition tooling and made it available to the masses
But, while Otter.ai is something that journalists love for its ease of use and modest price point, there still something missing in the
modern world of speech recognition.
Namely, improved accuracy
Otter and other services can do a fine job gisting a sound file into words and paragraphs, even working to differentiate between speakers
But it only so good, and it retroactive
With most calls that I execute for TechCrunch, for example, I record the chat on my phone, export the audio, upload it to Otter.ai, leave it
be and circle back later on to listen and clean up the text for use in an article
(Here one, for example.)
What Deepgram can do is a bit heavier-duty, and is not aimed at journalists or other individuals
Instead, Deepgram has built a speech recognition tool that it claims is more accurate, and can handle real-time text input
It sells the tech to large companies.
TechCrunch spoke with Deepgram CEO Scott Stephenson about his company product during our call about
Summarizing our chat, here what we found out
Instead of trying to improve existing tech — which doesn''t sport strong gross margins, the CEO said — Deepgram started from scratch,
building a deep learning tool that, after a few years& work, was a step ahead of other speech recognition technologies in terms of
accuracy.
Its investors agree
In a call with TechCrunch, Nvida Jeff Herbst, who took part in the investment, said that Deepgram was &one of the best, if not the best&
speech recognition companies around
Deepgram provides its services in two ways, hosted on its own hardware (the firm claims better margins by running its own metal, and, you
now know why Nvidia is involved), and on-prem on client hardware
The startup is targeting enterprise call centers and voice platforms as customers.
It took time to prove the company tech, years in fact
Deepgram then spent another few years testing out its possible commercial appeal
It may seem obvious today that there would be demand for what Deepgram built, but Gong.io and other, similar services are only so old
Regardless, after about four years, the company was content that it had proven out its product and customer base
Or as Stephenson told TechCrunch, the ''tech risk& that Deepgram faced is now behind it, as is its &market risk.
That why the company raised
now, so let talk about the round.
The round
Deepgram $12 million investment was led by Wing VC
Other firms took part, including Nvidia as mentioned, and Y Combinator and SAP.
What the money for? Adding staff, among other things
Deepgram has about 40 people today, but declined to tell TechCrunch how quickly it will scale personnel (oddly, as that a pretty standard
question), saying instead that it hiring aggressively, with a focus on go-to-market and engineering
The firm also intends to use some of its Series A on hardware.
What fun is that Deepgram has what it considers to be a strong market
position, now crossed with a pile of cash
How fast it can grow is now the question, and the first thing we&re asking the next time we speak with the firm.
