Expect Labs Raises $13M Series A to Bring Intelligent Voice Interfaces to Every Device and Application
Expect Labs' MindMeld is the first cloud-based service designed to power the emerging generation of voice-driven applications.
SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 18, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Expect Labs, the creator of the MindMeld platform for building intelligent voice interfaces, today announced that it has raised a $13 million Series A financing. This financing round was led by IDG Ventures and a subsidiary of USAA, and also includes Intel Capital, Samsung Ventures, Telefonica Digital, Liberty Global Ventures, Fenox Ventures, Westcott LLC, and Quest Venture Partners. These investors join Expect Labs' existing investors Google Ventures, Greylock Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners and KPG Ventures to bring the total funding for the company to $15.4 million.
Expect Labs will use this latest round of financing to fuel the growth of their developer platform MindMeld, which is a cloud-based service that enables companies to create next-generation voice experiences for any application or device. Expect Labs launched MindMeld earlier in 2014, and nearly 1000 companies are now using the platform to power a wide range of voice-driven content discovery applications. For instance, some companies use MindMeld to help their users easily browse and discover on-demand videos on their smart TV, set-top box or tablet using voice. Others rely on MindMeld to help users perform quick voice product searches in-store on their mobile app or website.
As voice-driven experiences become table stakes for every application, developers will face significant technical hurdles implementing this new functionality. MindMeld streamlines the adoption of natural voice interfaces by offering advanced machine learning and language understanding technology as an easy-to-use, cloud-based service.
"In just a few years, there will be three billion computing devices with microphones on the planet, but fewer than five percent of those will have keyboards," says Tim Tuttle, CEO and founder of Expect Labs. "In this world, natural voice interfaces will be essential for finding information quickly and accomplishing tasks efficiently."
"The team behind MindMeld has developed some powerful core technology which promises to be an essential ingredient as the $50B annual voice-search market emerges in the coming decade," says Alex Rosen, Managing Director of IDG Ventures. "We look forward to working with them to help usher in this revolution in voice-driven applications."
Founded in 2011, Expect Labs pioneered the development of technology to power a new generation of voice-driven applications. Since then, machine learning breakthroughs have led to speech recognition systems which will surpass human levels of accuracy for the first time since the dawn of AI. This has fueled the rapid adoption of voice-driven functionality in recent months, and MindMeld is poised to be the platform to power this emerging generation of intelligent voice-driven applications.
About Expect Labs
Expect Labs provides a cloud-based service called MindMeld that enables companies to build intelligent voice interfaces for any application or device. Nearly 1000 companies use this service to power next-generation, voice-driven experiences that enable users to quickly find and navigate information in a range of applications. Expect Labs has been widely recognized as a leader in the field of anticipatory computing and was named by MIT Technology Review as one of the world's "50 Smartest Companies" of 2014.
More information about Expect Labs and MindMeld is available at www.mindmeld.com.
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SOURCE Expect Labs
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