Deepgram announced it raised $130 million in Series C funding at a $1.3 billion valuation to accelerate development of its real-time voice AI API platform and support new product and ecosystem initiatives, including an acquisition, expanded intellectual property efforts, and a new collaboration space in San Francisco.
The round was led by AVP, which Deepgram described as an independent global investment platform focused on high-growth technology companies across Europe and North America. Deepgram said all major existing investors participated, including Alkeon, In-Q-Tel, Madrona, Tiger, Wing, Y Combinator, and funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, alongside new backers that included Alumni Ventures and Princeville Capital. The company also said strategic investors Twilio, ServiceNow Ventures, SAP, and Citi Ventures joined the financing, along with University of Michigan and Columbia University, adding to existing academic investors such as Stanford University.
Deepgram said it will use the funding to advance what it calls real-time “frontier” voice AI models and infrastructure aimed at powering fully duplex, contextual conversations at scale with low latency and high accuracy. The company positioned itself as an API-layer provider for an emerging B2B “Voice AI economy,” and said AVP’s global scaling experience will support international expansion, including in Europe.
Alongside the funding, Deepgram highlighted the launch of “Powered by Deepgram,” saying more than 1,300 organizations build voice AI functionality using its APIs across speech understanding, speech generation, analytics, orchestration, and autonomous voice agents. Deepgram also pointed to its product lineup, including Aura-2 for text-to-speech, Nova-3 for speech-to-text, Flux for conversational speech recognition designed to handle interruptions, a Voice Agent API, and Saga, which it describes as a Voice OS. The company said its models can be customized for domain terminology and acoustic environments, and deployed via cloud APIs or through self-hosted and on-premises options, supported by an SDK library.
Deepgram also announced it acquired OfOne, an AI-native voice platform focused on restaurants and the quick-service drive-thru market. The company said OfOne has delivered more than 95% containment for national QSR brands and that the OfOne team has joined Deepgram, with the technology now forming the foundation of a new “Deepgram for Restaurants” offering aimed at improving customer experience, increasing order accuracy, and supporting staff with real-time AI assistance. Deepgram said additional integrations and functionality are expected in the coming months.
The company said the new funding will further support expansion of its patent portfolio, which it said it has been filing continuously since 2016 and which includes several U.S. patents granted in 2025. Deepgram cited patents covering end-to-end automatic speech recognition with transformer-based approaches, hardware-efficient speech recognition methods designed to reduce latency and cost, and techniques for audio search and classification using internal neural representations.
Deepgram also said it is opening a new Voice AI Collaboration Hub in San Francisco intended to host hands-on working sessions, live demonstrations, executive briefings, community meetups, and developer hackathons, with the goal of bringing customers, partners, and builders together in person.
KEY QUOTES:
“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. 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.”
Elizabeth de Saint-Aignan, General Partner, AVP
“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. 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.”
Scott Stephenson, CEO and Co-Founder, Deepgram
“Voice is a critical, strategic, and data-rich customer engagement channel. 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.”
Andy O’Dower, Vice President of Product Management for Voice and Video, Twilio
“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. 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.”
Will Edwards, GM of Deepgram for Restaurants; Former CEO, OfOne
