Voci™ Raises $3.12M to Expand Customer Base, Allowing More Companies to Leverage the Spoken Voice of the Customer

PITTSBURGH--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Voci™ Technologies Inc. announced today that it has secured $3.12 million in Series A financing. The financing round was led by the Pittsburgh Equity Partners, with participation from existing investors including the BlueTree Allied Angels, Carnegie Mellon University, and the Innovation Works.

“We see tremendous growth potential for speech recognition in the enterprise analytics business and for Voci in particular due to their differentiated solution and high-caliber team of entrepreneurs.”

“Voci has produced impressive results in a short period,” commented Steve Robinson, Managing Partner at Pittsburgh Equity Partners. “We see tremendous growth potential for speech recognition in the enterprise analytics business and for Voci in particular due to their differentiated solution and high-caliber team of entrepreneurs.”

Voci introduced the world’s first commercial speech recognition appliance, V-Blaze™, last September. The system has roots in early work on accelerated speech recognition done at Carnegie Mellon. Voci’s implementation extends the technology using patent-pending techniques to overcome deficiencies that hindered the academic approach for commercial applications. V-Blaze accurately converts audio files to text orders of magnitude faster than any other speech recognizer, auto-transcribing 100 hours of live audio in one hour, and delivers scanning of up to 1000s of words at over 300x real time with exceptional accuracy.

Voci empowers enterprises to monitor customer interactions while the customer is on the call, initiating real-time alerts for intervention to address customer problems, prevent fraud, and improve cross selling based on live conversations. The Voci recognizers’ speed coupled with an affordable price liberates enterprises to analyze 100% of the recorded call center data to derive Voice of Customer insights to improve operations.

“We are pleased that our newest investor has recognized the commercial validation of Voci’s proprietary hardware-accelerated speech technologies and our innovative team focused on the fastest-growing segment of the business intelligence market,” said Anthony Gadient, Voci’s president and CEO. “We look forward to benefitting from Pittsburgh Equity Partners’ experience as we enter this next chapter in Voci’s growth.”

About Voci: Voci’s speech recognition appliances enable real-time call monitoring and alerts, and empower text analytics platforms to discover insights contained in the spoken voice of the customer. The company pioneered the commercial implementation of speech recognition algorithms in hardware to run orders of magnitude faster than alternatives. Voci’s affordable speech recognizers enable customer-driven enterprises to uncover information from 100% of all customer conversations captured through call centers. Voci also addresses national security and defense applications in which fast and comprehensive speech recognition and human language technologies are used to prevent crime and avert terrorism. For information, visit www.vocitec.com.

About Pittsburgh Equity Partners: Pittsburgh Equity Partners (PEP) is a venture capital fund specifically formed to grow Western Pennsylvania's most promising early-stage companies in the life sciences and information technology industries. PEP has developed a unique, focused and disciplined strategy for selecting early-stage technology companies for investment. This strategy is based on more than 40 years of combined investing experience of the two principals, Edward Engler and Stephen G. Robinson. Ed and Steve understand how to mitigate the risk associated with early-stage angel investing while still preserving the upside potential. For information, visit www.pghpep.com.