AssemblyAI Funding, Investors & Competitors

AssemblyAI has raised $113M across 5 funding rounds, most recently a $50M Series C in December 2023.

Last AssemblyAI funding round

$50M

Series C · Dec 2023

Cumulative funding AssemblyAI raised

$113M

across 5 funding rounds

Key investors in AssemblyAI

  • Y Combinator
  • Accel
  • TechNexus Venture Collaborative
  • Nat Friedman
  • Daniel Gross
  • Insight Partners
  • John Collison
  • Smith Point Capital

AssemblyAI Overview

About AssemblyAI

AssemblyAI is a San Francisco-headquartered speech AI company founded in 2017 that develops APIs for transcription, summarization, sentiment analysis, and speaker detection from audio. Its models process over 1 billion minutes of speech monthly, powering applications in call centers, media, and podcasts for clients including Spotify and Zoom. The platform supports 99+ languages with low-latency streaming and custom vocabulary training.


Founded

2017

HQ

United StatesSan Francisco, CA

Status

Privately held

Customer focus

B2B

Revenue model

Usage-based, Subscription

AssemblyAI Funding History

AssemblyAI has raised a total of $113M across 5 funding rounds.

AssemblyAI's first fundraising round was a $100K seed round in August 2017. The most recent completed round was a $50M Series C in December 2023.

AssemblyAI funding rounds

AssemblyAI funding rounds
DateStageInvestorsRaisedDeal Summary
Dec 2023Series CAccel (lead); Smith Point Capital; Daniel Gross; Y Combinator; Keith Block; Nat Friedman; Insight Partners$50MAssemblyAI develops AI speech models and APIs for tasks like speech-to-text, speaker identification, summarization, and moderation, enabling enterprises to integrate voice AI without handling model training or deployment. The company raised $50 million in a Series C funding round announced around December 4, 2023, led by Accel with participation from Insight Partners, Keith Block, Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, Smith Point Capital, and Y Combinator, bringing total funding to $115 million, with 90% raised in the prior 22 months. The funding supports ambitious research, development of new models including a universal speech model trained on over a petabyte (or 10 million hours) of voice data, procurement of AI training compute, market expansion, customer acquisition, and team growth from 115 employees by 50-75%. AssemblyAI's API serves thousands of organizations, processes over 25 million inference calls and 10 terabytes of voice data daily, and sees over 10,000 new sign-ups monthly. Customers include Fireflies.ai and Typeform, with models like Conformer-2 outperforming in noisy environments. Positioned as the 'Stripe for AI models,' AssemblyAI differentiates from big cloud providers by offering frequently updated, accurate, feature-rich, and easy-to-integrate speech AI. The company has attracted talent from DeepMind, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta, and views itself as early in the voice AI market amid surging demand from generative AI and LLMs.
Jul 2022Series BInsight Partners (lead); Y Combinator; TechNexus Venture Collaborative; Accel$30MAssemblyAI, a San Francisco-based provider of audio intelligence APIs for transcribing, understanding, and analyzing audio and video data, raised $30 million in a Series B funding round on July 14, 2022, led by Insight Partners with participation from Accel and Y Combinator. The company leverages advanced AI technologies including Transformers, Large Language Models, and massive GPU clusters, similar to those used in DALL-E 2, GPT-3, and LaMDA, to process millions of audio/video files daily for over 1,000 paying customers such as CallRail, Algolia, Veed, Fathom, WSJ, NBC Universal, and Spotify. Recent product updates included support for 15 new languages like Spanish, German, French, Italian, Hindi, and Japanese, plus improvements to Auto Chapters, Summarization, Real-Time Transcription, and Content Moderation models. From the start of 2022 to July 2022, AssemblyAI achieved 3x growth in revenue and user base, reaching hundreds of paying customers and more than 10,000 users while processing millions of API calls daily. The funding, bringing total capital raised to around $63-64 million following a $28 million Series A led by Accel in March 2022, was earmarked to triple the AI research team—composed of experts from DeepMind, Google Brain, Meta AI, BMW, and Cisco—and invest millions in GPU hardware for training larger AI models. CEO Dylan Fox emphasized accelerating AI infrastructure and research to solidify dominance in AI-as-a-service for speech-to-text and analysis. At the time, AssemblyAI employed 52 people and planned to nearly double its team size by year-end despite market headwinds, having barely used Series A proceeds. The round occurred amid surging demand for voice AI, with the company recognized as a high performer on G2 for voice recognition software. Subsequent developments included a Series C in December 2023 raising $50 million led by Accel with Insight Partners participation, pushing total funding over $108 million across seven rounds.
Mar 2022Series AAccel (lead); Daniel Gross; Y Combinator; Nat Friedman; John Collison; TechNexus Venture Collaborative; MAVA Ventures$28MAssemblyAI provides an API for speech analysis, including transcription, summarization, and moderation, targeting the growing demand for handling audio and video content. In March 2022, it raised a $28 million Series A round led by Accel, with participation from Y Combinator, John and Patrick Collison, Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, and others matching the query investors. The funding aimed to support recruitment, R&D infrastructure, and product expansion, including a $1 million spend on Nvidia A100 GPUs and servers for AI model training. At the time, the company had hundreds of paying customers and processed a million audio streams daily. It positioned itself as a Stripe or Twilio-like platform for speech-to-text and NLP features like topic detection. The company was recognized as a high performer on G2 in voice recognition software multiple times in 2021-2022. Total funding reached $63.1 million by then, later increasing to over $108 million across multiple rounds.
Nov 2020Series AAccel (lead); Daniel Gross (lead); John Collison (lead); Nat Friedman (lead); TechNexus Venture Collaborative$5M-
Aug 2017SeedY Combinator$100K-

Who has invested in AssemblyAI?

10 investors have backed AssemblyAI across its funding rounds, including Y Combinator, Accel, TechNexus Venture Collaborative, Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross and Insight Partners.

Lead investors include Accel, Insight Partners, Daniel Gross, John Collison and Nat Friedman.


AssemblyAI Investors

Investors in AssemblyAI by funding rounds participated
InvestorHQRoundsRoleFirst check
Y CombinatorUnited StatesSan Francisco, CA4ParticipantAug 2017
AccelUnited StatesPalo Alto, CA4LeadNov 2020
Daniel GrossUnited StatesSan Francisco, CA3LeadNov 2020
Nat FriedmanUnited StatesUnited States3LeadNov 2020
TechNexus Venture CollaborativeUnited StatesChicago, IL3ParticipantNov 2020
John CollisonUnited StatesUnited States2LeadNov 2020
Insight PartnersUnited StatesNew York City, NY2LeadJul 2022
Smith Point CapitalUnited StatesBoston, MA1ParticipantDec 2023

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AssemblyAI Competitors

AssemblyAI competitors include listed companies like C3.ai and Railtown AI Technologies, and private ones like Anthropic, OpenAI, Lovable and Reflection.Ai.

Public and private companies comparable to AssemblyAI
CompanyHQStatusRevenueEBITDAValuationRevenue Multiple
AnthropicUnited StatesSan Francisco, CAPrivate$47B-$965B20.5x
OpenAIUnited StatesSan Francisco, CAPrivate$25B-$852B34.1x
LovableSwedenStockholmPrivate$500M-$13B26.6x
Reflection.AiUnited StatesNew York City, NYPrivate--$8B-
C3.aiUnited StatesUnited StatesPublicly listed$250M($484M)$1.7B4.5x
Railtown AI TechnologiesCanadaCanadaPublicly listed-($4M)$46M-

AssemblyAI Public Comps

AssemblyAI is still privately-owned, but its public comps include Palantir, Snowflake, Cloudflare, Datadog, Atlassian, Z.ai, MongoDB, IonQ, DigitalOcean and JFrog.

Last FYEV/RevenueEV/EBITDA
RevenueEBITDALast FYLTM2027ELast FYLTM2027E
Palantir$4.5B$1.5B92.6x58.1x285.0x97.4x
Snowflake$4.7B($1.3B)25.6x21.0x(94.1x)121.7x
Cloudflare$2.2B($25M)54.6x44.3x(4653.4x)185.1x
Datadog$3.4B($588K)23.6x19.4x(137813.0x)77.6x
Atlassian$6.6B$142M7.4x7.2x342.1x23.7x
Z.ai$108M($658M)422.9x65.9x(69.4x)(73.0x)
MongoDB$2.5B($104M)11.9x10.4x(282.5x)49.6x
IonQ$130M($531M)109.9x40.3x(26.9x)(39.1x)

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Common questions about AssemblyAI

When was AssemblyAI founded?AssemblyAI was founded in 2017.
Where is AssemblyAI headquartered?AssemblyAI is headquartered in San Francisco, CA, United States.
Is AssemblyAI publicly listed?No, AssemblyAI is a private, VC-backed company.
How much funding has AssemblyAI raised?AssemblyAI has raised $113M across 5 funding rounds.
What was AssemblyAI's last funding round?AssemblyAI's last funding round was a $50M Series C in December 2023, led by Accel.
Who are AssemblyAI's investors?AssemblyAI's investors include Y Combinator, Accel, Daniel Gross, Nat Friedman, TechNexus Venture Collaborative, John Collison, Insight Partners, Smith Point Capital, Keith Block and MAVA Ventures.
Which companies are comparable to AssemblyAI?Companies comparable to AssemblyAI include Anthropic, OpenAI, Lovable, Reflection.Ai, C3.ai and Railtown AI Technologies.

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