AssemblyAI named to Fast Company’s list of Most Innovative Companies for 2025

AssemblyAI was built on innovation, so being named one of Fast Company’s 2025 Most Innovative Companies is not only an honor, but also validating for what we’re building to push the boundaries of Speech AI.

This award comes at a time when we’re seeing an explosion of new applications built with Speech AI, which is why we remain hyper-focused on solving real-world, last-mile problems in Speech AI for companies across a multitude of industries. Our team is constantly focused on raising the bar for what’s possible—just last week, we announced the upcoming release of two major products that are set to redefine industry standards for speech-to-text and speech understanding capabilities: Slam-1, an industry-first Speech Language Model, and a brand-new streaming speech-to-text model.

The reality is: Speech AI adoption is skyrocketing in 2025. It’s fueling everything from AI meeting notes to voice agents to medical scribes and much more. But, we still have a long way to go. Innovation will be critical over this next year in order to quickly solve the challenges that are shifting the way we transform speech data from speech to text to speech to meaning.

Our focus is on truly understanding audio/speech—including who said what, with what tone and emotion, across different domains, languages, environments, and contexts, and then making it easy to implement and deploy our models across applications and environments. It might sound like a subtle shift, but it’s actually a critical one—one that will be the difference between an AI Agent being interrupted by your kids or the TV in the background versus one that provides human-like interaction through background noise filtering, low latency, intelligent endpointing, and more. Most importantly, it will crack the code for Speech AI to truly work in enterprise workflows.

The future of Speech AI is promising—we’ve seen use of our APIs grow over 300% over the past 12 months alone with two-thirds of AI product leaders still preparing to incorporate Speech AI and multimodality into their applications. Recognitions like this one are yet another signal to the market that Speech AI adoption will continue to explode and disrupt industries this year and in the future. 

Thank you to the entire team for getting us to where we are today – being mentioned alongside companies that change their industries like NVIDIA, Waymo, and Duolingo is a huge honor. Innovation is centered around everything we do and who we are as a company, and I couldn’t be more proud of what we’re working on together.

Read the Fast Company article online here and find it on newsstands beginning March 25th.