Announcing Our $50M Series B Led by Meritech

David AI is the world’s first audio data research lab. We’re building the data layer for audio AI.

Today, we’re excited to share that we’ve raised a $50M Series B from Meritech, NVIDIA, and our existing investors Alt Capital, First Round Capital, Amplify Partners, and Y Combinator.

Audio AI has the incredible opportunity to bring AI into the ‘real world’, making AI accessible to billions of people. That said, the audio interfaces of the future require exponentially more data and evaluations than what is available today, to live up to this potential. David AI exists to create this data–the foundation that powers the models–which in turn powers these interfaces. If we do our job well, audio AI will proliferate, fueling all the real-world use cases we’re excited to see come to life, like humanoid robots, wearables, personal assistants, generative media.

"Audio is the frontend interface for real-world AI."

Today, we’re grateful to be working with several of the Mag7 and most of the leading AI labs. Our customers are pushing the frontier of audio AI, and while their models are progressing rapidly, they’re bottlenecked by access to training data and evaluations.

Audio–and specifically speech–is uniquely hard. Unlike code or math, evaluating speech is subjective and contextual. “Good” conversation depends on the setting - a customer support call is nothing like chatting with an AI companion. Audio also has far more degrees of freedom than text, such as emotion, tone, pace, accent, environment - every dimension matters. And multilinguality adds another layer - audio can’t be translated as easily as text, and accents and dialects create even more complexity.

These are fundamentally data problems. To solve them, we need datasets that are high quality and diverse enough to capture all these dimensions or generalize across them.

That’s why we’ve built David AI as an audio data research lab - to design, test, and collect audio datasets and evaluations with the same research-driven rigor our customers bring to model development. We care not just about data quality, but about how that data impacts a model.

We’re excited for this next chapter of growing David AI to better serve our customers.

If you’re excited by our mission, we’d love for you to apply.