Cambridge's Speechmatics has collected fresh funding from AlbionVC, IQ Capital Partners and business angels to take forward its growth strategy.
Speechmatics, a UK-based speech recognition platform developer based on University of Cambridge technology, yesterday obtained £6.4m ($8.2m) in a series A round led by AlbionVC, the venturing arm of investment firm Albion Capital.
The round was filled out by local deep tech-focused venture firm IQ Capital Partners and multiple unnamed angel investors.
Founded in 2009, Speechmatics offers a machine learning-driven speech recognition technology that can be applied to both live and pre-recorded multimedia clips containing verbal discourse in one of 29 supported languages.
Applications for the technology include instant audio transcription, broadcast subtitling and converting call centre recordings into text.
Clients can either upload their files to Speechmatics’ cloud-based platform or else utilise the software from on-premises computers, potentially appealing to enterprises with data privacy concerns.
Speechmatics stems from research undertaken by its founder Tony Robinson, a former advanced research fellow and lecturer at University of Cambridge who invented the approach in the 1980s during a Cambridge PhD focused on recurrent neural networks.
The series A cash will support the next phase of the spinout’s growth strategy, funding product development as well as a doubling in headcount to 100 before the end of 2019.
Speechmatics also hopes to drive geographical expansion with the launch of new offices in the US, Czech Republic and India.
The capital infusion comes on the heels of John Milliken, former chief operating officer at mobile payments business Infomedia, joining the company as CEO in January 2019.
Speechmatics had raised an undisclosed amount of growth capital in early 2017 from IQ Capital, Amadeus Capital Partners and angel investors including Laurence Garrett, Richard Gibson, and Ted Briscoe, professor of computational linguistics at Cambridge’s Department of Computer Sciences and Technology.