Bay Area, here we come.

We're opening a new office in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Here’s why.

Google, Meta, OpenAI, Nvidia, IBM and Apple.

All companies that share two things in common:

1) They are either pioneering or investing heavily in AI. Bard, Llama, ChatGPT, GPU processors, and Watson are practically household product names. The AI era is well and truly here, and we're currently in a Cambrian explosion of AI technology that's showing no signs of slowing down. Over a quarter of the total investments in US-based startups this year has gone toward AI companies, more than double the percentage of last year.

2) They are "hyperscaler" tech businesses that have a presence in the Bay Area of San Francisco. The nine counties that comprise this technology hub have the largest concentration of high-tech companies in the United States, at 387,000 high-tech jobs, of which Silicon Valley accounts for 225,300 high-tech jobs.

We recently told the world about our new vision for Speech Intelligence  - a bold move beyond the world of ASR to embrace the latest breakthroughs in AI and Large Languages Models (LLMs) to unlock the value of speech in a way that's simply not been possible before. We've already launched capabilities such as Summaries, Sentiment, and Topics based on these breakthroughs, but we know far more are ahead of us.

This journey we're on will involve a huge amount of innovation; in our core ASR to ensure broad language coverage with high accuracy, in the development of new capabilities that provide insight, analysis, and value, and finally in the ability to integrate with complimentary products and platforms.

To maximize the opportunity we have in front of us, we must be in the room where it happens (to quote Hamilton). If London is the center of AI innovation and investment in Europe (and we've already got a hub there), then the Bay Area is the place to be as a rapidly scaling tech business at the forefront of AI innovation.

That's why we're opening our newest office there, to maximize the success we have seen to date, but now on a global stage. This will place us firmly in the center of a thriving AI community and let us be physically closer to a huge talent pool as well as partners and customers. We'll be growing our US team throughout 2024, so watch this space for new openings as they appear.

This new presence will also enable us to capitalize on the growth we've seen in the US and to further support our customers and partners to succeed in scaling AI driven solutions to a broader array of markets. We'll use this opportunity to ensure the development of our roadmap is aligned with their needs across a wide variety of industries from Media to Contact Center Analytics and EdTech. Some of our customer and partner brands include Veritone, ENCO, Echo 360, AI Media and Nvidia.

Ryan Steelberg, the CEO and President of Veritone Inc commented "We have onboarded Speechmatics, as a premier natural language AI partner, to our proprietary aiWARE operating system to capture, identify, and categorize spoken words quickly, extracting insights automatically from unstructured audio and video files".

"We're delighted with the partnership we have with them, and are excited by the prospect of them having a presence nearby on the West Coast of the US. The future of AI will be built off the back of partnerships between innovative companies like Speechmatics and Veritone".

California, here we come ✈️