By Scott Stephenson
CEO
Last Updated
Today, we are sharing some important news from Deepgram. We are proud to announce the completion of our latest funding round and acquisition of Of.One. You can read the full announcement in our press release. But before talking about what’s next, I want to take a moment to reflect on how we got here.
Deepgram is often described as an “overnight success.” In reality, it’s been ten years in the making.
We started Deepgram with a simple but ambitious belief: that speech is the most natural interface between humans and machines, and that existing approaches to speech recognition weren’t good enough for the world that was coming. From the beginning, we took a different path—building our own deep learning infrastructure, training models from the ground up, and focusing relentlessly on accuracy, speed, and scalability, even when that meant doing the harder thing.
That long-term mindset is why today the majority of the voice AI ecosystem is powered by Deepgram. From customer support platforms to healthcare tools, from media analytics to emerging AI agents, many of the products people rely on every day run on Deepgram under the hood—even if they never see our name.
What’s exciting isn’t just where we are today, but where this technology is heading.
We’re moving toward a world where machines don’t just transcribe words, but truly understand spoken communication. A world where AI can practice active listening—reading the room, detecting intent and emotion, adjusting tone, and responding in a way that feels natural and human. Internally, we often talk about “passing the audio Turing test”: the moment when interacting with a machine through speech feels indistinguishable from talking to another person.
That future is closer than most people realize.
None of this happens without an exceptional team. I’ve always believed that doing meaningful, difficult work is a privilege—and it’s even more special when you get to do it with people you genuinely respect. At Deepgram, we’ve created an environment that combines the best elements of a startup, an academic lab, and an incubator: rigorous thinking, deep curiosity, fast execution, and a constant push to explore what’s possible.
This latest milestone is a testament to the people building here every day—and to the customers and partners who trust Deepgram as a core part of their stack. I’m incredibly grateful, and even more excited for what comes next.
