Deepgram raises $130 million at $1.3 billion valuation, acquires YC-backed startup for voice AI

Deepgram raises $130M at $1.3B valuation and buys a YC AI startup | TechCrunch

Usage of voice AI in sales, marketing, customer support, and consumer applications has shot up in the last few years. As a result, model providers have seen increased business, along with investor interest. On the back of this demand, today, Deepgram said that it has raised $130 million in a Series C round led by AVP at a $1.3 billion dollar valuation. The round also saw existing investors such as Alkeon, In-Q-Tel, Madrona, Tiger, Wing, and Y Combinator put in more money. Plus, new investors like Alumni Ventures, Columbia University, Princeville Capital, Twilio, and SAP joined the round. The company has raised over $215 million in funding to date. The startup's raise continues the trend of sizable funding rounds in voice AI last year, including Seasame's $250 million Series B, ElevenLab's $180 million Series C, and Gradium's $70 million seed round. Elizabeth de Saint-Aignan, a partner at AVP, told TechCrunch that when the fund was talking to enterprises about how they were using AI, voice came up frequently, and it started looking into companies working in this area. "In 2024, when we were talking to enterprises about how they were thinking about using AI inside their business, we started to hear about them using voice AI in processes like contact centers and sales development. When we chatted with them more, we realized a lot of voice AI tech was powered by Deepgram, and that's what led us to them [Deepgram]," Saint-Aignan said. She noted that voice AI could help in making customers' interactions with enterprises more pleasant while reducing costs for companies, and Deepgram could play a central part in it. Deepgram has a bunch of models related to text-to-speech and speech-to-text, along with platforms and APIs for conversational speech recognition and interruption handling with low latency. It noted that more than 1,300 organizations use its voice AI products and models, including meeting notetaker Granola, voice agent startup Vapi, and Twilio. The company's CEO, Scott Stephenson, said that the company didn't need the fundraise and it was cashflow positive last year. "In the last year, voice AI has gone mainstream, and there is more potential pull. We see that we can make larger investment sooner in order to accelerate growth. And that is why we felt it could be a good time to raise," he said. "We weren't out looking for a raise, though. We had multiple people coming to us. We wanted strategic investors who understand voice AI and the technical intricacies of it and have relationships with companies building using the technology." The company wants to use the new fundraising to expand its global footprint and better support multiple languages. It is also focusing on catering to restaurants through voice AI. To that end, it has acquired Y-Combinator-backed Ofone, which built a voice AI-powered solution for quick service restaurants. The startup claims that it has more than 93% accuracy in receiving orders. Voice AI has had its challenges in the restaurant space. Last year, Taco Bell withdrew its voice AI experiment after a person ordered 18,000 water cups. "I am excited about this [voice AI-driven food ordering] because food ordering might be the first positive interaction more than 300 million Americans have with voice AI. There have been a lot of sour interactions with voice AI over the last 20 years, where a lot of assistants have come out, and people felt that those didn't provide a magical experience. But when you can order your food using natural conversation, people would think the technology is ready," Stephenson said. There seems to be investor interest in the sector, as OfOne's acquisition news comes after Presto, which serves brands like Carl's Jr., picked up $10 million in new funding. Analysts' reports peg the voice market to grow at over 30% year-over-year and become a $14-$20 billion market by 2030. With this growth rate, model and API providers will look to be multibillion-dollar companies by becoming a core component for enterprises and startups developing voice solutions.

Voice AI startup Deepgram raises $130 million at $1.3 billion valuation

Jan 13 (Reuters) - Voice AI technology startup Deepgram said on Tuesday it raised $130 million at a $1.3 billion valuation as it looks to expand internationally, roll out new models, and pursue acquisitions. The funding round was led by AVP, an investment firm that focuses on tech startups across North America and Europe, with participation from new investors including Alumni Ventures, Princeville Capital and Citi Ventures, the company said. Existing backers including Tiger Global, Madrona and the CIA's venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel also participated in the Series C funding, it added. San Francisco-based Deepgram provides enterprises and developers with artificial intelligence models and infrastructure to build and run custom AI voice agents that can hold real-time, contextual conversations at scale. The fundraising comes as companies adopt AI agents in call centers and customer service across industries including retail, fintech and healthcare. "Voice ⁠AI has gone mainstream in the last year. Any place where there's a text field or a button click, all of those products are working on adding voice, so there's just this groundswell of demand," Deepgram CEO and Co-Founder Scott Stephenson said in an interview with Reuters. The company will use the funds to expand to new markets in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, increase the ⁠number of languages supported, ⁠and fund acquisitions and large compute purchases, Stephenson added. Deepgram currently supports over 50 languages, according to its website. The company on Tuesday also said it had acquired OfOne, a voice AI platform for drive-thrus, to expand its restaurant industry offering. It did not provide details on the value of the deal. More than 1,300 organizations use voice AI functionality powered by Deepgram's API platform, the company said. It powers conversational customer-service AI platforms such as Decagon and Sierra, and counts NASA and Amazon Web Services among its clients. Reporting by Deborah Sophia in Bengaluru; Editing by Tasim Zahid Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

Voice AI Startup Deepgram Picks Up $130 Mn, Looks to Serve QSR Chains | AIM

Deepram will use the funding to expand globally and support more languages through its voice AI technology. Voice AI technology startup Deepgram has secured $130 million in a Series C funding round, achieving a valuation of $1.3 billion as it aims to expand internationally, launch new models, and pursue acquisitions. The funding round was spearheaded by AVP, an investment firm that targets tech startups across North America and Europe, with participation from new investors, including Alumni Ventures, Princeville Capital, and Citi Ventures, according to the company. This investment positions Deepgram well to provide the next-generation Voice AI models and platform necessary to effectively support billions of live conversations with the naturalness, latency, and accuracy characteristic of human voice. AVP looks to support Deepgram's international growth, particularly in Europe and other key markets. "Much like Stripe delivered the API platform underpinning the payments economy, we believe Deepgram is poised to deliver the API platform underpinning the emerging trillion-dollar B2B Voice AI economy," Elizabeth de Saint-Aignan, general partner at AVP, said in a statement. Deepgram provides various models for both text-to-speech and speech-to-text, as well as platforms and APIs that facilitate conversational speech recognition and manage interruptions with low latency. The company highlighted that over 1,300 organisations use its voice AI products and models, including meeting notetaker Granola, the voice agent startup Vapi, and Twilio. The organisation aims to leverage its latest fundraising efforts to broaden its global presence and enhance support for multiple languages. Additionally, it is focused on serving the restaurant industry through voice AI. To achieve this, it has acquired OfOne, a Y Combinator-backed startup that developed a voice AI solution specifically for quick-service restaurants. "From pioneering end-to-end deep learning for voice, to earning multiple patents for our research, to our commitment to pass the Audio Turing Test at scale in 2026, we've consistently executed on a single vision: powering a future centred on the original human interface -- voice," Scott Stephenson, CEO and co-founder of Deepgram, said in the statement. The Audio Turing Test evaluates whether a human listener can distinguish between a human voice and an AI-generated voice.

Real-time voice AI unicorn Deepgram raises $130M to streamline human-to-machine interactions - SiliconANGLE

Real-time voice AI unicorn Deepgram raises $130M to streamline human-to-machine interactions Real-time voice artificial intelligence startup Deepgram Inc. has reasons to think the new year could be a good one after raising $130 million in funding at a $1.3 billion valuation. It also unveiled its latest acquisition, buying an AI-native voice startup called OfOne Inc. that's focused on restaurants and the quick-service drive-through market. The Series C round announced today was led by AVP and saw the return of all major existing investors, including Alkeon, In-Q-Tel, Madrona, Tiger, Wing and Y Combinator, plus new backers such as Alumni Ventures, Columbia University, Twilio Inc., SAP SE and Princeville Capital. Deepgram won over those investors with its highly sophisticated speech recognition engine, which enables AI models to understand what humans are saying to them with impressive accuracy, no matter how accented someone's voice might be. Speech recognition is key to enabling humanlike conversations with AI, and that means Deepgram is poised to have a significant impact on the industry as it gravitates to voice-based interactions. Deepgram's technology has been praised due to the way it adds a level of realism to human-AI interactions. It teaches conversational models to wait for the most appropriate moment to break into a conversation, similar to how another human might wait until someone else pauses before interjecting. It's also "interruptible," meaning that humans can interject themselves while it's talking, and it will immediately pause and reconfigure its response based on what the person says. In an interview with SiliconANGLE, Deepgram Chief Executive and co-founder Scott Stephenson said real-time voice has a different bar than most AI experiences: "The response has to be generated in 500 milliseconds or less." Stephenson argued the voice AI market shifted meaningfully in 2025 as customers crossed a belief threshold, moving from dismissing voice due to clunky implementations such as Siri and legacy IVR systems to viewing it as "skeptical to inevitable." The startup aims to position itself as the application programming interface platform for the communications economy, in the same way that Stripe Inc. became the API foundation of the payments industry and Twilio Inc. did for application communications. Deepgram has developed a number of APIs that it says will serve as the foundational infrastructure layer for voice AI. For instance, Aura-2 is a specialized text-to-speech system that's focused on clarity, realism and ultra-low latency, while Nova-3 is a real-time, enterprise-grade speech-to-text model that's built for accuracy, and Flux is the world's first real-time conversational speech recognition model developed specifically for chatbots. It has also created the Voice Agent API, which serves as a unified foundation for cost-effective and enterprise-ready voice agents. Its APIs are currently used by more than 1,300 enterprise clients across a wide selection of industries. Each of its models can be customized to support nuanced, domain-specific terminology and deployed via the cloud or on-premises servers. The acquisition of OfOne is aimed at helping boost Deepgram's presence in the customer service industry. The startup's team and technology will anchor the new Deepgram for Restaurants service, which is a specialized voice model that's trained to take orders from human customers and support restaurant staff with real-time AI assistance. "The impact of AI for restaurants and drive-throughs is enormous, and together we can deliver on that opportunity with the accuracy, speed and reliability operators need at international scale," said OfOne CEO Will Edwards, who will take on the role of general manager of Deepgram for Restaurants. According to Stephenson, retail represents the first mass touchpoint for everyday voice AI, and the environment is the real test: "Retail is extremely important for many people, their first interaction with voice AI is going to be in a retail setting." He argued that the complexity of drive-thru acoustics is exactly why Deepgram wanted to go deeper than its usual API-first approach. "This is [an] extremely challenging acoustic environment," he said. In recent years, multiple retail voice AI pilot programs have been scaled back or abandoned, including Taco Bell pulling back its drive-thru program and McDonald's putting the brakes on its AI voice options. Stephenson said, "the gap is getting both the model layer and infrastructure layer right, and it's very hard to do that unless you're sort of boots on the ground... figuring it out." In addition to the funding and acquisition, Deepgram is also opening a new Voice AI Collaboration Hub in San Francisco to give the voice AI community a physical space to interact. The hub will be designed for hands-on working sessions, live demonstrations, executive briefings, community meetups and developer hackathons. Stephenson framed voice as the next major computing surface: "It's the new interface," he said, adding, "I think it's a trillion-dollar market easily."

This AI Founder Says He Wasn't Looking for Capital. Investors With $130 Million Changed His Mind

"In the last year, voice AI has gone mainstream, and there is more potential pull. We see that we can make larger investment sooner in order to accelerate growth," he told TechCrunch. "We weren't out looking for a raise, though. We had multiple people coming to us. We wanted strategic investors who understand voice AI and the technical intricacies of it and have relationships with companies building using the technology." Those investors include global investment platform AVP, which led the round. It included participation from new and existing investors including Alkeon, In-Q-Tel, Madrona, Tiger, Wing, Y Combinator, Alumni Ventures, Princeville Capital, Twilio, ServiceNow Ventures, SAP, and Citi Ventures. University of Michigan and Columbia University also invested, according to a press release. Deepgram has raised more than $215 million to-date, including $47 billion in 2022 that completed a $72 million series B, according to TechCrunch. At that time, the company did not disclose a post-funding valuation. Deepgram was founded in 2015 and went through Y Combinator in the winter 2016 batch. Stephenson detailed the company's decade-long rise in a blog post, accompanying the announcement. It all started with a belief that speech is "the most natural interface between humans and machines," but that existing speech recognition technologies "weren't good enough for the world that was coming," he explained. Deepgram has spent the years since building out a proprietary deep learning infrastructure, training models and focusing on "accuracy, speed, and scalability," according to the blog.

Voice AI startup Deepgram raises $130 million at $1.3 billion valuation

Voice AI startup Deepgram has secured $130 million in funding, valuing the company at $1.3 billion. This investment will fuel international expansion into Europe and Asia-Pacific. Deepgram also plans to develop new AI models and pursue strategic acquisitions. Voice AI technology startup Deepgram said on Tuesday it raised $130 million at a $1.3 billion valuation as it looks to expand internationally, roll out ⁠new models, and pursue acquisitions. The funding round was led by AVP, an investment firm that focuses on tech startups across North America and Europe, with participation from new investors including Alumni Ventures, Princeville Capital and Citi Ventures, the company said. Existing backers including Tiger Global, Madrona and the CIA's venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel also participated in the Series C funding, it added. San Francisco-based Deepgram provides enterprises and developers with artificial intelligence models and infrastructure to build and run custom AI voice agents that can hold real-time, contextual conversations at scale. The fundraising comes as companies adopt AI agents in call centers and customer service across industries including retail, fintech and healthcare. "Voice AI has gone mainstream in the last year. Any place where there's a text field or a button click, all of those products are working on adding voice, so there's just this groundswell of demand," Deepgram CEO and Co-Founder Scott Stephenson said in an interview with Reuters. The company will use the funds to expand to new markets in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, increase the number of languages supported, and fund acquisitions and large compute purchases, Stephenson added. Deepgram currently supports over 50 languages, according ⁠to its website. The ⁠company on Tuesday also said it had acquired OfOne, a voice AI platform for drive-thrus, to expand its restaurant industry offering. It did not provide details on the value of the deal. More than 1,300 organisations use voice AI functionality powered by Deepgram's API platform, the company said. It powers conversational customer-service AI platforms such as Decagon and Sierra, and counts NASA and Amazon Web Services among its clients.

Voice AI startup Deepgram raises $130 million at $1.3 billion valuation

Jan 13 (Reuters) - Voice AI technology startup Deepgram said on Tuesday it raised $130 million at a $1.3 billion valuation as it looks to expand internationally, roll out new models, and pursue acquisitions. The funding round was led by AVP, an investment firm that focuses on tech startups across North America and Europe, with participation from new investors including Alumni Ventures, Princeville Capital and Citi Ventures, the company said. Existing backers including Tiger Global, Madrona and the CIA's venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel also participated in the Series C funding, it added. San Francisco-based Deepgram provides enterprises and developers with artificial intelligence models and infrastructure to build and run custom AI voice agents that can hold real-time, contextual conversations at scale. The fundraising comes as companies adopt AI agents in call centers and customer service across industries including retail, fintech and healthcare. "Voice AI has gone mainstream in the last year. Any place where there's a text field or a button click, all of those products are working on adding voice, so there's just this groundswell of demand," Deepgram CEO and Co-Founder Scott Stephenson said in an interview with Reuters. The company will use the funds to expand to new markets in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, increase the number of languages supported, and fund acquisitions and large compute purchases, Stephenson added. Deepgram currently supports over 50 languages, according to its website. The company on Tuesday also said it had acquired OfOne, a voice AI platform for drive-thrus, to expand its restaurant industry offering. It did not provide details on the value of the deal. More than 1,300 organizations use voice AI functionality powered by Deepgram's API platform, the company said. It powers conversational customer-service AI platforms such as Decagon and Sierra, and counts NASA and Amazon Web Services among its clients. (Reporting by Deborah Sophia in Bengaluru; Editing by Tasim Zahid)