“Unmuting the world”: Spain’s SLNG raises €3.3 million to challenge US-centric speech AI infrastructure
Barcelona-based startup SLNG.ai has secured €3.3 million in pre-Seed funding, aiming to disrupt the US-centric dominance in the voice AI infrastructure market. The company plans to offer a unified platform for developers, startups, and enterprises, challenging the limitations of current voice technology which often overlooks numerous languages and markets. This investment signifies a growing interest in Europe's voice and speech technology sector. SLNG's platform will integrate various speech models and ensure global deployment with regional compliance, addressing key challenges in the current landscape. The funding round was led by Earlybird VC, and is aimed at providing developers with essential tools to create a truly global voice ecosystem. The company's focus on infrastructure, in contrast to application-level systems, positions it uniquely in the market. This initiative directly addresses several critical issues within the speech AI domain. The issues include the lack of regional compute, missing industry-specific models, and compliance barriers. The primary concern for many is the optimization for premium languages, thereby leaving other languages and dialects as an afterthought, and the high latency and data residency issues for non-US centric deployment. SLNG's approach may help in fostering digital sovereignty. The pre-Seed round indicates a rising trend in European voice technology, with similar recent investments in voice assistants, voice agents, and speech enhancement technologies. SLNG aims to establish itself as a key player in the foundational layer of Europe's speech ecosystem.
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