Today we’re excited to share that we’ve raised a $28M Series A led by Accel, with participation from a great group of investors including Y Combinator, John and Patrick Collison (Stripe), Nat Friedman (GitHub), and Daniel Gross (Pioneer). This funding will help us accelerate our development of advanced AI models for Automatic Speech Recognition, Speech Understanding, and NLP.
Over the past few years, there’s been an explosion of audio and video data on the internet. You see this everyday with the rise of Zoom meetings, podcasts, audio-first social media platforms, enterprise conversation intelligence platforms, live streaming, etc. Hundreds of businesses and thousands of developers have come to rely on AssemblyAI’s Speech-to-Text APIs to quickly, automatically, and accurately convert audio data into text within their applications - powering a wide variety of use cases.
Beyond just transcription, our Audio Intelligence APIs, including our APIs for content moderation, summarization, PII Redaction, and topic detection, have been helping customers to quickly build exciting applications and products for their users/customers, that drive huge ROI.
These APIs are being used to moderate user-generated audio content at scale, deliver insights to customer support and contact center agents in call center AI products, serve more targeted ad campaigns into audio content, summarize Zoom meetings, and a number of other exciting use cases.
Over the past year, we’ve seen our customer base and revenue triple, and our APIs now process over one million audio files every single day from hundreds of paying customers and thousands of developers. Dozens of fast growing, venture backed startups are building the next generation of audio and video applications with our APIs, including startups like CallRail, Fathom, Algolia, Milk Video, and VEED. Dozens of industry leading enterprises, like NBC and Dow Jones, have also come to leverage our APIs to power mission critical products and features at scale.
All of this being said, we’re still at the very beginning of our journey. Even though AI technology has shown incredible improvements over the past few years, this technology is still in its infancy. With that, we’re committing a huge portion of these new funds toward continuing our AI research and development efforts - spending over $1M on GPU infrastructure in the next three months alone. These efforts will enable us to rapidly develop new State-of-the-Art models across Speech Recognition, NLP, and all of the other domains we support.
Beyond transcription, we have exciting plans to expand our platform to serve an even greater range of use cases for different data types, like bringing intelligence to text documents and other forms of media - which is something that many of our customers have been asking us for.
We never would have gotten here without the amazing support of our customers, and the thousands of developers that have come to use our APIs over the years. Thank you for trusting us! We’re excited to double down on everything we’ve been working on, and to rapidly accelerate our pace of product development and growth.
If you're not a customer of AssemblyAI yet, and are interested in using our APIs for your business, you can schedule a demo with our technical sales team today.
This is only the beginning for us, and we can’t wait to share more as we progress on our journey. We’re hiring across all departments - deep learning, sales, marketing, engineering, etc. If you’re interested in learning more about our open roles, check out our careers page, or reach out to me directly at dylan@assemblyai.com.
Onwards!
