Deepgram, a company developing voice-recognition tech for the enterprise, today raised $47 million in new funding led by Madrona Venture Group with participation from Citi Ventures and Alkeon. An extension of Deepgram’s Series B that kicked off in February 2021, led by Tiger Global, it brings the startup’s total raised to $86 million, which CEO Scott Stephenson says is being put toward R&D in areas like emotion detection, intent recognition, summarization, topic detection, translation and redaction.
“We’re pleased that Deepgram achieved its highest-ever pre- and post-money valuation, even despite the challenging market conditions,” Stephenson told TechCrunch in an email interview. (Unfortunately, he wouldn’t reveal what exactly the valuation was.) “We believe that Deepgram is in a strong position to thrive in this tougher macroeconomic environment. Deepgram’s speech AI is the core enabling technology behind many of our customers’ applications, and the demand for speech understanding grows as companies seek greater efficiency.”
Launched in 2015, Deepgram focuses on building custom voice-recognition solutions for customers such as Spotify, Auth0 and even NASA. The company’s data scientists source, create, label and evaluate speech data to produce speech-recognition models that can understand brands and jargon, capture an array of languages and accents, and adapt to challenging audio environments. For example, for NASA, Deepgram built a model to transcribe communications between Mission Control and the International Space Station.
