San Francisco-based speech recognition technology startup Deepgram recently announced that it has raised an undisclosed amount of investment from In-Q-Tel, the venture capital capital arm of U.S Intelligence community. Post the investment, IQT and its government partners will start testing Deepgram’s transcription technology.
Earlier, the startup had raised $12mn in Series A funding round led by Wing VC along with NVIDIA, Y Combinator, and other investors in March. The investment sextupled Deepgram’s total funding to $13.9mn.
Later, when the COVID-19 health crisis worsened in April, the company donated $1mn worth of its platform to assist medical providers, up to $50,000 of tech each depending on their size and need.
“We’ve had a good uptake on medical [services] since then,” said Deepgram CEO Scott Stephenson. “I don’t think it will fade. [Speech recognition and transcription tech is] not only valuable now or if a pandemic happens again, but forever.”
“Deepgram’s use of an AI-enabled, neural network architecture leveraging custom speech recognition models trained on vast amounts of audio data allows them to rapidly achieve much more accurate transcriptions for non-standard audio environments vs solutions like Google Voice and Apple Siri”, In-Q-Tel Managing Partner George Hoyem said in a statement.
He further added, “Using state of the art transfer learning also enables Deepgram to quickly build speech to text capabilities for new and novel language variants on relatively small amounts of training data, resulting in huge time savings for our government partners.”
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