Speechmatics
Headquarters
Cambridge, United KingdomFounded
2006CEO / Founder
Katy WigdahlEmployees
51-200Funding
Series B — $90.6MProducts
1 product listedAvg. AI Score
8.0/10Website
speechmatics.com/
Profile updated
About Speechmatics
Speechmatics is a Cambridge, England-based artificial intelligence company that develops automatic speech recognition, translation, and text-to-speech technology. It was founded in 2006 as Cantab Research by Tony Robinson, a speech-recognition researcher who did early work on recurrent neural networks, and later rebranded as Speechmatics.
The company sells speech-to-text APIs that transcribe audio across more than 50 languages, alongside real-time transcription, translation, and a voice agent product called Flow that pairs its recognition models with large language models and text-to-speech. Its Ursa family of models underpins these services, which can run in the cloud, on-premises, or on-device. Customers and partners include Adobe, Ubisoft, Veritone, LiveKit, and 3Play Media, and Speechmatics targets regulated sectors such as media, healthcare, and contact centers.
Led by chief executive Katy Wigdahl, who was promoted from chief financial officer, Speechmatics has raised roughly $90.6 million to date. In June 2022 it closed a $62 million Series B round led by Susquehanna Growth Equity, with participation from AlbionVC and IQ Capital, following an earlier venture round backed by Amadeus Capital Partners, AlbionVC, and IQ Capital. The company employs just over 100 people.
Specialties
Financials
Dated, source-cited figures. Estimates are marked.
Products by Speechmatics
All products by Speechmatics reviewed by our AI panel of experts.
How Our Review Panel Scores Speechmatics
Six independent reviewer personalities assessed Speechmatics's product on their own terms. They landed within 0.6 points of each other, an unusually strong consensus.
Averaged across 1 reviewed product in our catalog. Scores are out of 10.
Competitive Landscape
Who Speechmatics competes with, and how they differ.
Cloud-only API-first ASR competitor on usage-based pricing like Speechmatics, built around its own Nova model family for high-throughput streaming and batch transcription; lacks Speechmatics' on-device and on-prem deployment options.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewed
Direct speech-to-text API rival with a self-serve free tier and an added audio-intelligence layer (summarization, sentiment) on top of transcripts, versus Speechmatics' enterprise sales motion and regulated-industry on-prem/on-device deployments.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewed
Newer entrant building low-latency state-space-model voice models (Ink for STT, Sonic for TTS) optimized specifically for real-time conversational agents, a narrower focus than Speechmatics' broader enterprise transcription and compliance use cases.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewed
TTS-first voice AI platform (cloning, dubbing) that has expanded into conversational voice agents, overlapping with Speechmatics' Flow API; ElevenLabs monetizes primarily on voice generation while Speechmatics remains STT-first.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewed
Whisper is a free/low-cost commodity ASR model available via API or self-hosting, undercutting Speechmatics on price; Speechmatics competes on real-time streaming accuracy (its own Ursa benchmarks claim 25% fewer errors than Whisper), on-device/on-prem deployment and enterprise compliance.
2 products reviewed on TopReviewedCompany Timeline
Key milestones in Speechmatics's history, with sources.
- Partnership
Adobe and Speechmatics ship on-device speech recognition for Premiere Pro
Adobe and Speechmatics released an on-device speech-to-text model for Premiere Pro that keeps audio local while landing within 5% of cloud transcription accuracy, deepening a partnership dating to 2021.
globenewswire.com - Launch
Launches world-first Arabic-English bilingual medical speech model
Speechmatics released a bilingual Arabic-English clinical transcription model spanning Gulf, Egyptian and Levantine dialects, reporting 6.3% WER and 35% fewer errors than the nearest competitor on mixed-speech medical benchmarks.
businesswire.com - Launch
Introduces Flow API for real-time voice agents
Speechmatics launched Flow, an API pairing its real-time ASR with an LLM and text-to-speech to power conversational voice agents across 50+ languages, opening a waitlist ahead of general release.
audioxpress.com - Launch
Releases Ursa speech recognition engine
Speechmatics launched its Ursa generation of speech-to-text models, scaling the self-supervised model to 2 billion parameters and citing up to 18.2% accuracy gains on domain-specific vocabulary versus its prior Enhanced model.
speechmatics.com - Funding
Raises $62M Series B led by Susquehanna Growth Equity
Speechmatics closed a $62M (£50M) Series B led by Susquehanna Growth Equity, with existing investors AlbionVC and IQ Capital participating; Susquehanna's Jonathan Klahr joined the board.
techcrunch.com - Partnership
Becomes Adobe Premiere Pro's speech-to-text partner
Speechmatics became Adobe's speech recognition provider when Adobe Premiere Pro shipped built-in speech-to-text, making it the first non-linear video editor with integrated STT.
globenewswire.com - Funding
Raises £6.35M Series A led by AlbionVC
Speechmatics closed a £6.35M Series A led by AlbionVC with follow-on from IQ Capital, funding international expansion including new offices in Brno, Chennai and Denver.
tech.eu - Funding
Closes growth funding round backed by IQ Capital and Amadeus Capital
Speechmatics closed a growth funding round (amount undisclosed) backed by IQ Capital, Amadeus Capital Partners and angel investors including former SwiftKey chairman Richard Gibson, its first institutional capital.
speechmatics.com - Founded
Cantab Research Ltd (later Speechmatics) incorporated in Cambridge
Dr Tony Robinson, who pioneered neural-network speech recognition at Cambridge University, incorporated Cantab Research Limited, later trading as Speechmatics.
find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk
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