Series B28 June 2022

Speechmatics secures £50m Series B funding led by Susquehanna Growth Equity to expand operations

Susquehanna Growth Equity led the Series B round, which will fund international expansion and infrastructure upgrades.

£50.0MSeries B

Speechmatics builds automated speech recognition technology that processes audio across multiple languages and formats. The company operates globally with a focus on deep learning models.

Speechmatics has secured £50m in Series B funding to scale its operations internationally and enhance its machine learning capabilities. The round was led by Susquehanna Growth Equity, with further backing from existing investors AlbionVC and IQ Capital.

The capital injection will be deployed to accelerate expansion across the United States and the Asia-Pacific region. In addition, the firm intends to upgrade its data centre infrastructure and increase investment in research and development.

The Cambridge-based business applies deep learning to speech recognition, allowing its software to understand diverse accents and dialects without manual tagging. Jonathan Klahr of Susquehanna Growth Equity will take a seat on the company board following the transaction.

From the founder

"Our progress in the last few years left us inundated with interest from investors for our Series B fundraise. We chose to work with Susquehanna Growth Equity because they have a fantastic global footprint and a history of supporting significant growth in software businesses. The team is smart and ambitious but also pragmatic which is critical in this environment. The patient capital will enable us to double down on our vision to close the gap between humanity and machines, which is incredibly exciting. The Speechmatics team is hugely ambitious. We have a real heritage in speech technology combined with some of the world’s most talented speech and machine learning experts. We cannot wait to accelerate our growth and unlock the understanding of more and more voices."

Katy Wigdahl

CEO at Speechmatics

Investor perspective

"The Speechmatics team are undoubtedly a different pedigree of technologists. We started tracking Speechmatics when our portfolio companies told us that again and again Speechmatics win on accuracy against all the other options including those coming from ‘Big Tech’ players. We are primed to work with the team to ensure that more companies can get exposed to and adopt this superior technology."