Deepgram 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.
Powered by Deepgram
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.
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 Acquires OfOne to Expand Real-Time Voice Automation into Restaurants
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.
Expansion of Patent Portfolio
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.
New Voice AI Collaboration Hub in San Francisco
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.
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This entry was posted on January 13, 2026 at 11:20 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Deepgram. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Deepgram Raises $130M Series C at $1.3B Valuation to Power the Voice AI Economy
Deepgram 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.
Powered by Deepgram
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.
Deepgram’s industry-leading offerings include:
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 Acquires OfOne to Expand Real-Time Voice Automation into Restaurants
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.
Expansion of Patent Portfolio
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.
New Voice AI Collaboration Hub in San Francisco
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.
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This entry was posted on January 13, 2026 at 11:20 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Deepgram. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.