- PyannoteAI has raised $9 million to make voice transcriptions clearer with AI.
- The startup's AI model can be used for tasks such as audio indexing and dubbing.
- BI got an exclusive look at the pitch deck used to secure the fresh funding.
Voice intelligence startup PyannoteAI has just raised $9 million in a seed round led by Crane Ventures and Serena.
The French startup, launched in 2024, has developed an AI model for a concept called "speaker diarization." It's the process of enhancing audio transcriptions to distinguish between different speakers — something that AI has historically struggled with.
"Our mission is to make human and AI interactions natural through voice," Vincent Molina, cofounder and CEO, told Business Insider. "The voice AI industry today mostly focuses on one-to-one conversations between humans and AI. But real-life conversations aren't like that. They're full of multi-speaker situations, overlapping speech, interruptions, and short and chaotic speech turns," he said.
The startup's platform aims to ensure that the AI model not only picks up on an accurate audio transcription but also understands who is speaking and their intonation. The intended result is for AI to preserve the meaning of audio across different languages and use cases.
The model was developed using research conducted by the startup's cofounder, Hervé Bredin, who has authored over 30 papers on the topic.
PyannoteAI's enterprise use cases include indexing large-scale audio for media platforms, streamlining the dubbing process, and transcribing consultations across enterprise and healthcare. It counts Gladia and MediVox as its clients.
Voice AI has gained significant traction in the past year, with the likes of ElevenLabs and PolyAI raising significant rounds in recent months.
Molina said his startup had increased investor interest from both Europe and the US. "The entire voice AI landscape is accelerating — across all layers: infrastructure, applications, models, and more," he told BI. "Since we're positioned at the very beginning of the value chain, and because we serve the entire ecosystem, we received strong interest from a wide range of investors."
The funding confirms BI's November report that PyannoteAI was in talks to raise about $10 million.
In addition to Crane Ventures and Serena, PyannoteAI's funding round had participation from Julien Chaumond, the chief technology officer of HuggingFace, and former Meta and OpenAI researcher Alexis Conneau.
With the fresh funding, the startup said it plans to grow its research team.
Check out the pitch deck used to raise the capital, shared exclusively with Business Insider.
