AssemblyAI Raises $28 Million in Series A, for All-in-One API
AssemblyAI Background:
AssemblyAI, is aiming at becoming the solution of choice for analyzing speech, offering ultra-simple API access for transcribing, summarizing, and otherwise figuring out what’s going on in thousands of audio streams at a time.
“If you want to do content moderation, or search, or summarize audio data, you have to turn that data into a format that’s more pliable, and that you can build features and business processes on top of,” said AssemblyAI CEO and co-founder Dylan Fox. “So we were like, let’s build super-accurate speech analysis API that anyone can call, even at a hackathon — like a Twilio or Stripe style integration. People need a lot of help to build these features, but they don’t want to glue a bunch of providers together.”
AssemblyAI has hundreds of paying customers and tripled its revenue in the last year. The firm now processes a million audio streams a day.
“We’re 100% live. There’s a huge market and a huge need, and the spend from customers is there,” Fox said.
What will the funding be used for?
The $28M Series A round is led by Accel, with participation from Y Combinator, John and Patrick Collison, Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross. The plan is to spread the funding across recruitment, R&D infrastructure, and building out the product pipeline.
As Fox noted, the company is spending a million on GPUs and servers in the next few months, a bunch of Nvidia A100s that will power the incredibly computation-intensive research and training processes. Otherwise you’re stuck paying for cloud services, so it’s better to rip that Band-Aid off early.
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