Deepgram Raises $130M Series C at $1.3B Valuation to Power the Voice AI Economy

SAN FRANCISCO (January 13, 2026) – Deepgram, the real-time API platform underpinning the Voice AI economy, today announced it has raised $130 million in Series C funding at a $1.3 billion valuation. The round was led by AVP, an independent global investment platform dedicated to high-growth technology companies across Europe and North America.

All major existing investors joined the round, including Alkeon, In-Q-Tel, Madrona, Tiger, Wing, Y Combinator, and funds and accounts managed by BlackRock. Several new investors, including Alumni Ventures and Princeville Capital, invested in the round, in addition to industry leaders such as Twilio, ServiceNow Ventures, SAP, and Citi Ventures. University of Michigan and Columbia University also invested, joining other existing academic investors such as Stanford University.

With this investment, Deepgram is ideally positioned to deliver the real-time frontier Voice AI models and platform required to reliably power billions of live conversations with the naturalness, latency, and accuracy of human voice. AVP was selected as lead investor for its deep expertise scaling category-defining companies globally and its ability to support Deepgram’s international expansion, including Europe and other key markets.

“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,” said Elizabeth de Saint-Aignan, General Partner at AVP. “Deepgram’s success in building real-time, reliable, and massively scalable Voice AI infrastructure, combined with the rapid shift toward voice-first B2B experiences, positions the company to become one of the foundational AI companies of this decade.”

“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 – this is Deepgram,” said Scott Stephenson, CEO and Co-Founder of Deepgram. “From pioneering end-to-end deep learning for voice, to earning multiple patents for our research, to our commitment to pass the Audio Turing Test at scale in 2026, we’ve consistently executed on a single vision: powering a future centered on the original human interface – voice.”

“We are pleased to welcome AVP and our new strategic investors,” continued Stephenson. “Together with our existing investors, their conviction reflects the emergence of the Voice AI economy – and Deepgram’s role in powering it.”

Today, more than 1,300 organizations build Voice AI functionality powered by Deepgram APIs. Deepgram APIs are a foundational infrastructure layer of a global set of offerings delivering real-time, accurate, and reliable speech understanding, speech generation, analytics, orchestration, and fully autonomous voice agents.

"Voice is a critical, strategic, and data-rich customer engagement channel," said Andy O'Dower, Vice President of Product Management for Voice and Video at Twilio. "Twilio's flexible orchestration capabilities and global communications infrastructure, combined with speech recognition powered by Deepgram APIs, deliver seamless, low-latency, and human-like AI agent experiences that are powering today's Voice AI renaissance."

Deepgram’s industry-leading offerings include:

• Aura-2, the world’s most professional, cost-effective, and enterprise-grade text-to-speech model
• Nova-3, the world’s most accurate, real-time and reliable speech-to-text model
• Flux, the world’s first Conversational Speech Recognition model built specifically to solve the biggest problem in voice agents – interruptions
• Voice Agent API, the world’s only enterprise-ready, real-time, and cost-effective conversational AI API
• Saga, the Voice OS

All Deepgram models can be customized to domain-specific terminology and acoustic environments and deployed as cloud APIs or through self-hosted and on-premises options. A full SDK library is available to simplify development and accelerate production timelines.

See the Powered by Deepgram page to learn more about how the most innovative AI organizations in the world build Voice AI functionality powered by Deepgram.

Deepgram also announced today the acquisition of OfOne, an AI-native voice platform created for restaurants and the quick-service drive-thru market. OfOne has consistently delivered more than 95% containment, with high employee satisfaction scores and strong operational impact for national QSR brands.

The OfOne team has joined Deepgram, and its technology now anchors Deepgram for Restaurants, an offering built to help restaurants improve customer experience, increase order accuracy, and support overstretched staff with real-time AI assistance. Additional functionality and expanded integrations will be delivered in the coming months.

“We are incredibly proud to join the Deepgram team. Deepgram has built the most advanced real-time voice platform in the world, and it is the perfect foundation for scaling what we started at OfOne,” said Will Edwards, GM of Deepgram for Restaurants (formerly CEO at OfOne). “The impact of AI for restaurants and drive-thrus is enormous, and together we can deliver on that opportunity with the accuracy, speed, and reliability operators need at international scale.”

New funding will also accelerate Deepgram’s expansion of its intellectual property, building on a patent portfolio filed continuously since 2016, with several key U.S. patents granted in 2025. US 12,380,880 for End-to-End Automatic Speech Recognition With Transformer establishes a novel method for integrating and training ASR and transformer models as a single system, leading to improvements in accuracy and speed. This is complemented by US 12,334,075 for Hardware-Efficient Automatic Speech Recognition, which utilizes intelligent batching and parallel processing to ensure optimal hardware use, directly reducing latency and cost for customers handling massive volumes of voice data. Most recently, US 12,499,875 for Deep Learning Internal State Index-Based Search and Classification protects techniques for leveraging internal neural representations to enable faster audio search and more accurate classification at scale. These newly granted patents solidify Deepgram’s leadership in core deep learning architecture, representation learning, and deployment efficiency.

Deepgram is opening a new Voice AI Collaboration Hub in San Francisco to bring the voice AI community together in person. Designed for meaningful collaboration with customers, partners, and builders, the space will host hands-on working sessions, live demonstrations, executive briefings, community meetups, and developer hackathons – creating a shared environment where ideas turn into products and the future of Voice AI is built together.

AVP is an independent global investment platform dedicated to high-growth, tech (from deep-tech to tech-enabled) companies across Europe and North America, managing more than €2.5bn of assets across four investment strategies: venture, early growth, growth, and fund of funds. Its multi-stage platform combines global research with local execution to drive investment. Since its establishment in 2016, AVP has invested in more than 60 technology companies and in more than 60 funds with the Fund of Funds investment strategy. Beyond providing equity capital, its expansion team works closely with founders, providing the expertise, connections, and resources needed to unlock growth opportunities and create lasting value through meaningful collaborations. For more information, please visit: www.avpcap.com.

Deepgram is the real-time API platform underpinning the Voice AI economy. Its Voice AI platform offers speech-to-text (STT), text-to-speech (TTS), and full speech-to-speech (STS) capabilities–all powered by its enterprise-grade runtime. 200,000+ developers build with Deepgram’s voice-native foundational models – accessed through cloud APIs or as self-hosted / on-premises APIs – due to its unmatched accuracy, low latency, and pricing. Customers include technology ISVs building voice products or platforms, co-sell partners working with large enterprises, and enterprises solving internal use cases. Having processed over 50,000 years of audio and transcribed over 1 trillion words, there is no organization in the world that understands voice better than Deepgram. To learn more, please visit www.deepgram.com, read its developer docs, or follow @DeepgramAI on X and LinkedIn.