Deepgram, the real-time API platform underpinning the Voice AI economy has reached a unicorn status after raising $130 million in Series C funding at a $1.3 billion valuation.
The round was led by AVP, an independent global investment platform dedicated to high-growth technology companies across Europe and North America.
All major existing investors joined the round, including Alkeon, In-Q-Tel, Madrona, Tiger, Wing, Y Combinator, and funds and accounts managed by BlackRock. Several new investors, including Alumni Ventures and Princeville Capital, invested in the round, in addition to industry leaders such as Twilio, ServiceNow Ventures, SAP, and Citi Ventures.
University of Michigan and Columbia University also invested, joining other existing academic investors such as Stanford University.
With this investment, Deepgram is ideally positioned to deliver the real-time frontier Voice AI models and platform required to reliably power billions of live conversations with the naturalness, latency, and accuracy of human voice. AVP was selected as lead investor for its deep expertise scaling category-defining companies globally and its ability to support Deepgram’s international expansion, including Europe and other key markets.
“Much like Stripe delivered the API platform underpinning the payments economy, we believe Deepgram is poised to deliver the API platform underpinning the emerging trillion-dollar B2B Voice AI economy,” said Elizabeth de Saint-Aignan, General Partner at AVP. “Deepgram’s success in building real-time, reliable, and massively scalable Voice AI infrastructure, combined with the rapid shift toward voice-first B2B experiences, positions the company to become one of the foundational AI companies of this decade.”
“As we rapidly approach a world where billions of simultaneous conversations are powered by Voice AI, enterprises and developers need real-time, reliable infrastructure capable of fully duplex, contextual conversations at scale – this is Deepgram,” said Scott Stephenson, CEO and Co-Founder of Deepgram. “From pioneering end-to-end deep learning for voice, to earning multiple patents for our research, to our commitment to pass the Audio Turing Test at scale in 2026, we’ve consistently executed on a single vision: powering a future centered on the original human interface – voice.”
“We are pleased to welcome AVP and our new strategic investors,” continued Stephenson. “Together with our existing investors, their conviction reflects the emergence of the Voice AI economy, and Deepgram’s role in powering it.”
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Today, more than 1,300 organizations build Voice AI functionality powered by Deepgram APIs. Deepgram APIs are a foundational infrastructure layer of a global set of offerings delivering real-time, accurate, and reliable speech understanding, speech generation, analytics, orchestration, and fully autonomous voice agents.
“Voice is a critical, strategic, and data-rich customer engagement channel,” said Andy O’Dower, vice president of Product Management for Voice and Video at Twilio. “Twilio’s flexible orchestration capabilities and global communications infrastructure, combined with speech recognition powered by Deepgram APIs, deliver seamless, low-latency, and human-like AI agent experiences that are powering today’s Voice AI renaissance.”
