Deepgram has raised $130 million in Series C funding at a valuation of $1.3 billion, as the San Francisco-based company looks to expand its real-time voice artificial intelligence platform amid growing enterprise adoption of voice-driven technologies.
The funding round was led by AVP, an investment firm focused on high-growth technology companies in Europe and North America. Existing investors including Alkeon, In-Q-Tel, Madrona, Tiger, Wing, Y Combinator and funds managed by BlackRock also participated, alongside new investors such as Alumni Ventures and Princeville Capital.
Strategic corporate investors including Twilio, ServiceNow Ventures, SAP and Citi Ventures joined the round, while academic institutions including the University of Michigan and Columbia University also invested, the company said.
Deepgram provides application programming interfaces that enable real-time speech recognition, speech generation and conversational voice agents. Its platform is used by more than 1,300 organisations to build voice-based applications for enterprise and customer-facing use cases.
Elizabeth de Saint-Aignan, general partner at AVP, said the firm saw Deepgram as a foundational infrastructure provider for enterprise voice AI.
“Much like Stripe delivered the API platform underpinning the payments economy, we believe Deepgram is poised to deliver the API platform underpinning the emerging trillion-dollar B2B Voice AI economy,” she said.
Deepgram CEO and co-founder Scott Stephenson said the company was focused on delivering infrastructure capable of supporting large-scale, real-time voice interactions.
“As we rapidly approach a world where billions of simultaneous conversations are powered by Voice AI, enterprises and developers need real-time, reliable infrastructure capable of fully duplex, contextual conversations at scale,” Stephenson said.
Deepgram said the funding would support further development of its voice AI platform, international expansion, and the launch of new initiatives including a “Powered by Deepgram” partner programme.
Deepgram acquires OfOne
The company also announced the acquisition of OfOne, an AI-native voice platform focused on restaurant and drive-through automation, as part of its push into industry-specific applications.
The OfOne team has joined Deepgram, with its technology forming the basis of a new offering aimed at restaurants and quick-service operators. Will Edwards, former CEO of OfOne, said the combination would allow the technology to scale internationally.
The company said it would also use the funding to expand its patent portfolio, building on intellectual property filings dating back to 2016, and to open a new Voice AI Collaboration Hub in San Francisco for developers, partners and customers.
Enterprise interest in voice-based automation has increased as companies seek more natural interfaces for customer service, sales and internal workflows. Investors have increasingly backed infrastructure providers that offer low-latency, real-time AI capabilities rather than application-layer tools alone.
Deepgram said it has processed more than 50,000 years of audio and transcribed over one trillion words, positioning it to compete as voice AI adoption accelerates across sectors.
