Businesses are betting big on generative AI to gain a competitive edge. However, recruitment challenges remain.according to Recent EY research shows that a significant portion of companies considering implementing generative AI believe that rapid advances in the field and the proliferation of vendors claiming to have AI expertise complicate adoption prospects. It says that it has become.
But their spending doesn’t tell you that. According to IDC forecast, global investment in “AI-centric” systems could reach $154 billion by the end of the year. and MIT Tech Review poll Research shows that 50% of companies plan to increase their data infrastructure and AI budget by 25% or more next year.
This boom is benefiting startups such as: Assembly AI The company (which we’ve covered three times on TechCrunch) is a self-described “applied AI” venture that researches, trains, and deploys AI models for developers and product teams to integrate into apps and services.
AssemblyAI claims that its paying customer base has grown 200% over last year to 4,000 brands, and that its AI platform currently handles approximately 25 million API calls per day. Additionally, AssemblyAI says more than 200,000 developers are developing on the platform and using it to process more than 10 terabytes of data per day.
“AI models are rapidly improving and evolving,” AssemblyAI co-founder and CEO Dylan Fox told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Companies that leverage AssemblyAI’s API platform can focus on building new AI products, applications, and workflows without having to keep up with the rapid pace of model development, training, and model innovation. You also don’t have to worry about deploying it at scale, which is very difficult to achieve high availability at low cost.”
AssemblyAI development platform.
AssemblyAI’s success has attracted the attention of prominent investors, some of whom recently contributed to new funding for the startup. Announced today, AssemblyAI led a $50 million round with participation from former Salesforce co-CEO Keith Block, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, Insight Partners, and Y Combinator. AssemblyAI’s total funding now stands at $115 million.
Fox, a machine learning engineer by trade, founded AssemblyAI in late 2017. He said he was inspired by the Amazon Echo, which Fox claims is one of the first great examples of a product enabled by better AI systems for voice.
“When we started exploring building our own products using the variety of voice AI models available at the time, most companies were still using legacy, inaccurate voice AI models through hard-to-use developer products. I was disappointed in what they were offering,” Fox said. “This motivated me to start his AssemblyAI. I had a vision of creating superhuman AI models, available through an easy-to-use developer platform and capable of building a whole new class of AI applications. It will be like this.”
Currently, AssemblyAI offers AI models designed to perform tasks such as speech-to-text, speaker identification, content moderation, and audio summarization through APIs, specifically voice-focused models. I am. Fox said customers such as his meeting transcription app Fireflies run a variety of content through the model, from phone calls and his Zoom meetings to podcasts and videos.
Today, there is no shortage of both open and proprietary voice models from rival startups like Deepgram, Rev, and Speechmatics, as well as big tech companies like Google Cloud, Azure, and AWS. But Fox claims, rightly or wrongly, that AssemblyAI’s models are more “advanced,” “accurate,” “capable,” and “feature-rich” than its competitors.
“Big cloud companies offer similar products…but they are updated less frequently, are less accurate, have far fewer features, and are much more difficult to integrate,” he says. continued.
AssemblyAI isn’t resting on its laurels, however. Some of the new funding will go towards a ‘universal’ voice model that the company will train on petabytes of voice data and is expected to launch later this year, Fox said. AssemblyAI is also expanding its workforce, aiming to grow from 50% to 75% next year to 115 employees.
“We are working to build Stripe for AI Models, which gives developers and product teams easy access to cutting-edge AI through a simple API,” said Fox. “By providing these things to our customers, they can focus on building more vertical applications and internal workflows that leverage our proprietary data and AssemblyAI’s ever-improving voice AI models…New funding round We’ve been building runway for years and seeing incredible results.” Given the mainstream push around AI, the demand and adoption of the product will increase significantly. ”