Big Idea:

AssemblyAI, a speech AI startup, received $50M in a Series C funding round, bringing its total outside funding to $115M for the enhancement of its cloud-based speech AI models. The funding is for corporate growth amidst their expanding customer base. 

Why It Matters:

AssemblyAI intends to acquire additional AI computing infrastructure to broaden the company's array of neural networks. They are also developing a new AI model, named Universal, anticipated to surpass the capabilities of its recent Conformer-2 system across various aspects. Universal is undergoing training on a dataset approximately 10 times larger than the one employed for Conformer-2. The training operations are conducted on Google Cloud instances utilizing internally-developed TPU chips, specifically designed to optimize performance for AI workloads.

Key Details:

• Investors included Accel, Insight Partners, Salesforce Inc. co-Chief Executive Keith Block, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and more.
• AssemblyAI's customer base grew 200%, now serving 4,000 brands.
• It is projected that the global AI investments could reach $154 billion by year-end.

“We’re now regularly serving over 25 million inference calls, and processing over 10 terabytes of voice data, every day through our API for our customers,” said AssemblyAI founder and CEO Dylan Fox.

What's Next:

The company aims to make the Universal model available to customers in the very near future.