David AI

It’s been incredible to see how far the world of audio and speech has come since Tomer C. and I started David AI. Every week we see new breakthroughs in voice AI, and at David AI, we’re building the datasets that make those breakthroughs possible, powering real-world systems and cutting-edge research at top AI labs. We recently raised a $50M Series B to expand our audio data research lab and grow our technical team. Two exciting roles in San Francisco that I want to call out: • Staff Product Engineer, Technical Lead: Responsible for the vision and execution of our entire audio data research platform • Founding ML Infrastructure Engineer: Build and scale the ML backbone that powers our audio data research and intelligence We are also hiring across engineering, research, product, ML, and operations. If you are interested in any of our open roles, please reach out! The link to our careers page is in the comments.

We're excited to announce our Series B today!

We're grateful to be named as one of Forbes' Next Billion-Dollar Startups of 2025, alongside awesome startups we admire! We’re excited to continue growing David AI in service of our customers. We produce high-quality training data that powers frontier speech capabilities, enabling them to build state-of-the-art voice experiences and models. Check out the full list here: https://lnkd.in/dT4eTMyW

The David AI team is heading to ICML this week. If you’re working on audio, speech, or voice AI, we’d like to meet! We’d love to talk to folks about: → Bringing AI into the real world through voice → New capabilities we think audio, speech, and voice models should have → Researching and building with the David AI team We’ve built the world’s first audio-data research lab, collecting thousands of hours of carefully designed, high-signal audio datasets. We’ll be around through Saturday. Please reach out and we can set up time to meet at ICML. See you in Vancouver!

Congrats to David AI $25 M Series A! A story on how, during the YC batch, Tomer C. & Ben Wiley got from a niche problem in robotics to solving a big problem and becoming the first audio research data lab, building the “Common Crawl for audio" To train LLMs, there is plenty of text data on the internet, but high-quality audio data has... almost nothing. Most online sound is mono, noisy, and unusable for end-to-end speech models that expect studio-clean, speaker-separated tracks. David AI solves this by capturing conversations separated at the source. During YC summer 24, Tomer & Ben were iterating on their idea and cold-called founders to ask, “What’s your hardest multimodal pain?” A robotics company desperately wanted high-quality voice data. Although Tomer & Ben worked at Scale AI, they scratched their heads as to why this was a big enough problem They trusted the need of this startup and set out to build over a weekend a phone-call app where friends dialed in, and the first audio dataset was created. That first dataset revealed the gap: vertical depth beats horizontal breadth. David AI became an audio data research lab, inventing collection methods, running in-house R&D, and scaling only when the data boosts model performance. No regex farms, and they realized why nobody built it. It was hard to build these datasets at scale. Traction sped up: $1 k pilot → six-figure deal by Demo Day → seven-figure contracts just a few months later. Today, they power the voice layer for big tech labs and a wave of YC voice-agent startups https://lnkd.in/guwYRRHj

Very excited that David AI is announcing their Series A, just 6 months after we led their Seed! Not just that, but they raised their A from exceptional investors—Jack Altman and Elaine Dai at Alt Capital and Sarah Catanzaro and Barr Yaron at Amplify Partners. I wanted to share why our excitement for David AI has grown by the minute since First Round Capital's investment: 1) Obsession with customers & love from customers: Not only do Tomer C. and Ben Wiley spend 24/7 (literally) ensuring David AI is the best Audio AI partner to each and every customer of theirs, but whenever I talk to one of their customers (incl Fortune 500s), customers tell me that the partnership they feel with David AI is unprecedented—that they've never had a vendor treat them the way David AI does. Customers of theirs have told me that the David AI feels more like an extension to their team and product, than a vendor. 2) Passion for what they do: The entire David AI team—every single employee—is obsessed with audio AI and staying at the cutting edge of research and product. It's a level of focus on craft that is truly rare. 3) Company growth: I can't not mention this one. It's rare to hear a startup have this much excitement and 'market pull' from customers. The growth they've had not only in new customers but from existing customers is beyond impressive. 4) The team: If I were looking for a new job, David AI is on my short list of companies I'd apply to. Not just because of their growth, product market fit, and customer love... but because the leaders and team at David AI are beyond words amazing. I could write an essay on this. 5) Market growth: As a VC, it feels like 25% of pitches in my inbox are "Voice AI for __"... those are all powered by the amazing model companies, many of which are being powered by David AI. Even if you haven’t heard of David AI, you’ve probably indirectly benefited from them. Oh and PS ... they're hiring 😀

We’ve raised a $25M Series A to build the data layer for audio AI! This round was led by Alt Capital and Amplify Partners, with participation from First Round Capital, Y Combinator, BoxGroup, and all our existing investors. We’re excited to welcome Jack Altman to our board. In less than a year, David AI has become a trusted partner to most of the leading audio AI labs–our datasets powering their research and products. Our conviction is simple: voice is how AI enters the real world. To realize this future, we need much more audio data. Applications are only as good as the models they rely on—and those models are only as good as the data they’re trained on. As the frontier of audio AI advances, the need for new kinds of audio data accelerates. With this round, we’re building David AI into the world's first audio data research lab. We develop datasets with the same rigor that researchers apply to models–designing, evaluating, iterating, and scaling datasets with precision. Because of our focus, we can invest deeply in audio products, infrastructure, operations, and models which, in turn, allows us to build the best audio datasets. We’re hiring across research, engineering, product, and operations. We’d love to meet you if you’re excited about our mission. You can check out our open positions below.

We raised a $5M seed round led by First Round Capital! We started David AI to build the data layer for audio AI. In the past months, we’ve partnered with many of the world’s leading audio AI labs to support their speech data needs. We’re grateful for the investors that have joined us on our mission: First Round Capital, BoxGroup, Y Combinator, SV Angel, Liquid 2 Ventures, and an awesome set of angels. Also, we’re hiring! Please reach out if you’d like to join us. Blog: https://lnkd.in/ec5bZrpA