Canadian AI Startup Raises Seed Round to Commercialize Voice Technology

Fluent.ai has raised a seed round. The artificial intelligence startup secured $1.8 million from BDC Capital, Danhua Capital, AI investors from the Creative Destruction Lab, and angel investors from the Maple Leaf Angels.

The Candian company, which is focused on developing accurate and flexible voice interfaces for the Internet-of-Things and beyond, is now graduating from Montreal incubator TandemLaunch and is leveraging intellectual property originally developed within international research universities.

“Fluent.ai’s technology addresses many of the problems with current voice interfaces with its limited training data set and compute power,” said Dovey Wan, Managing Director of Danhua Capital.

The funding will be used to “to further build our team and accelerate the commercialization of a unique and valuable AI voice interface solution,” according to CEO Niraj Bhargava.

“BDC Capital, through its Venture Acceleration Program, decided to invest in Fluent.ai because of its strong technical team, experienced CEO, large global market opportunity, and the support of knowledgeable strategic advisors, including those of the Creative Destruction Lab,” said Michelle Scarborough, Managing Director, Strategic Investments and Women in Tech at BDC Capital.

Fluent.ai’s patented acoustics-only solution learns the meaning of specific speech patterns and triggers actions accordingly. Because it doesn’t rely on standardized text-based vocabularies, it aligns to individual users, even those with complex languages, accents or voice impairments easily.

“I am very pleased with strong market interest and the investment community’s overwhelming response,” adde Bhargava.

Fluent.ai has offices in Montreal and Ottawa.