Babblabs, a fresh start-up in advanced speech processing, announced today a Series Seed investment of $4 million led by Cognite Ventures, with additional funding support from Jerry Yang, founding partner of AME Cloud Ventures, and notable independent investors John Hennessy, Harvey Jones, James Hogan and Kurt Keutzer. The financing will be used to fund Babblabs initial development and productization of advanced cloud and embedded speech processing systems using deep neural network and audio processing technologies. Chris Rowen, Cognite CEO and well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneur, will be CEO of Babblabs.

Just as speech has become the foundation for much of the world's telecommunications, it has also emerged as one of the most important new mediums for human-machine interaction. The confluence of deep learning methods and advanced audio signal processing has enabled a degree of speed and accuracy that has created a fast-growing category of speech-centric devices. However, new opportunities for speech recognition and analytics in the cloud, automotive infotainment/autonomy, advanced telephony and home automation markets require better, faster speech processing. These markets demand improved accuracy in real-world sound environments, solutions that can be personalized for each user and instantaneous functionality in low-cost devices.

"Our goal is to overcome the complex technical and market challenges that must be solved in order to power a new generation of devices and cloud systems," said Chris Rowen, cofounder and CEO of Babblabs. "To that end, we have brought together an extraordinary team of neural network researchers, speech processing architects, signal processing gurus and audio software experts. This seasoned team will drive unprecedented innovation in speech recognition, noise management, speed search, speaker identification and speech generation."

"I have chosen to invest in Babblabs because it has unique technology and keen market insights into the rapidly emerging speech-centric cloud applications world," said Jerry Yang, founding partner of AME Cloud Ventures. "Better yet, Babblabs has pulled together the kind of world-class founding team found at the core of the best tech start-ups."

About Babblabs

Founded in 2017 in San Jose, Babblabs Inc., develops new technologies for speech processing, using sophisticated deep neural networks and audio signal processing techniques. While Babblabs products have not been announced or released, the core capabilities of the company span human-human communication and human-machine interaction. The company has already built up a unique corpus of speech data and significant computing capacity to enable state-of-the-art training for speech-centric applications. For more information, visit http://www.babblabs.com.

About Cognite Ventures

Cognite Ventures LLC, led by Chris Rowen, invests in, advises and analyzes the deep learning start-up world. http://www.cogniteventures.com

About AME Cloud Ventures

AME Cloud Ventures is the venture fund led by Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo!

AME Cloud Ventures focuses on seed to later stage companies building infrastructure and value chains around data. http://www.amecloudventures.com