Reson8, an Amsterdam-based speech technology company, announced it has raised €5 million in a pre-seed funding round to advance its customizable automatic speech recognition platform designed for European languages. The round was led by Balderton Capital, with participation from NP Hard.
The company is focused on addressing a persistent gap in speech recognition performance beyond English. While English-language models have reached high levels of accuracy, performance often declines significantly across European languages, dialects, and specialized terminology. This creates challenges for organizations that rely on precise transcription, often requiring manual corrections or reliance on generic models that lack contextual understanding.
Reson8 is developing a new approach that emphasizes acoustic precision and real-time adaptability. Its platform enables speech recognition models to be customized dynamically using live context such as documents, websites, and calendars. Rather than retraining large models or layering additional language models, Reson8 uses smaller modular adapters that adjust recognition in real time without increasing latency.
The company was founded by Thomas Kluiters, Jarno Verhagen, and Raoul Ritter, who bring experience from high-frequency trading, healthcare speech technology, and large-scale AI systems. Their shared focus is on building systems that prioritize precision and adaptability in real-world environments.
Reson8’s technology is designed to handle specialized language use cases across industries. In healthcare, it supports accurate recognition of drug names and clinical terminology. In legal settings, it adapts to firm-specific language and jurisdictional vocabulary. In customer support, it recognizes product names and technical terminology specific to each organization.
A key differentiator for Reson8 is its commitment to building and operating its infrastructure within Europe. This approach is intended to provide customers with greater control over data residency and align with increasing regulatory and procurement requirements favoring European-hosted AI systems.
At launch, the platform will support more than 20 European languages, aiming to close the quality gap in non-English speech recognition. The newly raised capital will be used to expand the company’s European infrastructure, continue development of its speech models and inference stack, and selectively grow its team.
KEY QUOTES:
“Generic speech models break the moment you leave English, and customers increasingly want control over where their data lives. We feel strongly that Europe doesn’t need to be a fast follower in foundational AI. Instead, we can build the speech layer Europe can rely on: deeply customisable, engineered for accuracy, and run on infrastructure we own.”
Raoul Ritter, Co-Founder Of Reson8
“Speech is quickly becoming a default interface across software, from productivity tools to healthcare and public services. The Reson8 team stands out for their technical depth, the product’s focus on accuracy in real-world situations, and its Europe-first approach to infrastructure and data. We’re excited to back the team as they build a category-defining global speech company.”
James Wise, Partner At Balderton Capital
