Speechmatics closes growth funding round from leading tech investors

Speechmatics, the Cambridge-based speech technology company, has received investment from multiple leading investors to accelerate the commercial roll-out of its products. Founded by Chief Technology Officer Dr Tony Robinson, who pioneered PhD research into Recurrent Neural Networks in the 1980s, Speechmatics has developed a unique machine learning technology to harness the full potential of speech technology.
“This is an exciting time to be in speech recognition”, comments Robinson. “We are at the forefront of how deep neural networks are changing speech recognition. With our ever expanding and highly experienced R&D team, we continue to push the boundaries in speech technology, especially around languages, accuracy and deployment.”
The firm received investment from several sources, including technology venture capitalist IQ Capital, AI/machine learning specialist and technology investors Amadeus Capital Partners and a number of leading technology investors including Laurence Garrett (Highland Capital Europe), Cambridge Professor Ted Briscoe, a world expert in Natural Language Processing, as well as co-founders of CSR, and Richard Gibson (previously Exec Chairman at SwiftKey).
Benedikt von Thüngen, CEO of Speechmatics, said: “Over the past two years Speechmatics has seen substantial growth, entirely through cash-flow. The addition of these highly-experienced investors as advisors to the business will help accelerate the on-going commercialisation of our technology and place speech recognition technology at the heart of all communications.”
Ed Stacey, Partner at IQ Capital Partners, added: “Speechmatics’ disruptive technology has significantly greater accuracy than competitors such as Google, IBM or Microsoft, which opens up many new commercial opportunities for speech recognition – from call compliance driven by legislation such as MiFID II and PCI DSS, to content discovery and speech analytics in order to spot trends and understand the voice of the customer.”
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