Companies are increasingly investing in generative AI to secure a competitive advantage. However, they face challenges in adoption. A recent survey by EY reveals that many businesses eager to implement generative AI are struggling with the rapid advancements in the field and the influx of vendors claiming expertise, making their deployment efforts more complex.
Despite these hurdles, investment in AI continues to flourish. According to an IDC forecast, global spending on AI-driven systems is projected to hit $154 billion by year-end. Additionally, a poll by MIT Tech Review indicates that half of surveyed firms plan to increase their budgets for data infrastructure and AI by over 25% in the next year.
This growth trend is benefiting startups like AssemblyAI. AssemblyAI is an “applied AI” company that focuses on researching, training, and deploying AI models for developers and product teams to seamlessly integrate into their applications and services.
AssemblyAI reports a remarkable 200% increase in its paying customer base, now reaching 4,000 brands. Their AI platform handles approximately 25 million API calls daily, with more than 200,000 developers utilizing the platform to process over 10 terabytes of data each day.
“AI models are progressing rapidly,” said Dylan Fox, co-founder and CEO of AssemblyAI, in an email interview. “Enterprises using AssemblyAI’s API platform can concentrate on creating innovative AI products, applications, and workflows instead of getting bogged down in model development and deployment challenges. This alleviates the difficulties associated with scaling AI models efficiently and affordably.”
AssemblyAI’s innovative approach has attracted the attention of prominent investors. Recently, Accel led a $50 million funding round for the startup, with participation from former Salesforce co-CEO Keith Block, GitHub ex-CEO Nat Friedman, and Daniel Gross among others. To date, AssemblyAI has raised a total of $115 million.
Fox, a machine learning engineer, founded AssemblyAI in late 2017, inspired by the Amazon Echo—one of the first significant products made possible through superior AI systems for voice interactions.
As Fox explored building products using the available speech AI models at that time, he found many outdated and inaccurate options being offered through convoluted developer products. This dissatisfaction fueled his ambition to establish AssemblyAI, with the goal of delivering highly advanced AI models through a user-friendly platform that would empower the development of new AI applications.
Today, AssemblyAI specializes in speech-focused AI models that execute various tasks, such as speech-to-text conversion, speaker identification, content moderation, and summarization—all accessible through an API. Their clients, including Fireflies, a popular meeting transcription app, utilize these models to handle content from phone calls and Zoom meetings to podcasts and videos.
While competitors like Deepgram, Rev, Speechmatics, and tech giants such as Google Cloud, Azure, and AWS offer their own speech models, Fox asserts that AssemblyAI’s solutions are “more advanced,” “accurate,” “capable,” and “feature-rich” compared to others.
“Major cloud providers have similar offerings, but they are often outdated, less precise, limited in features, and tougher to integrate,” he noted.
Nevertheless, AssemblyAI is not complacent. A portion of the new funding will be directed toward developing a “universal speech model,” which is currently being trained on over a petabyte of voice data and is expected to launch later this year. The company is also planning to expand its workforce, aiming to increase its 115 employees by 50% to 75% in the coming year.
“Our vision is to create the ‘Stripe for AI models,’ providing developers and product teams with easy access to cutting-edge AI through a straightforward API,” Fox stated. “This allows our customers to focus on building specialized applications and workflows utilizing our proprietary data and the continuously improving capabilities of AssemblyAI’s speech AI models. Thanks to our recent funding, we have ample runway and are witnessing a strong demand for our products amidst the broader AI movement."
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