# Dylan Fox

> Dylan Fox is the founder and CEO of AssemblyAI, an AI research company building Speech AI models that transcribe and understand human speech through a developer-facing API. A former machine learning engineer at Cisco, he started AssemblyAI as a solo founder in 2017, went through Y Combinator, and grew it into a platform used by companies like Spotify, Zoom, and Fireflies.ai. The company processes tens of millions of API calls a day and has raised roughly $115M, including a $50M Series C led by Accel in December 2023.

- **Role:** Founder & CEO at AssemblyAI
- **Organizations:** AssemblyAI, Cisco (former), Y Combinator (alumnus)
- **Nationality:** American
- **Education:** Business Administration (Business Economics & Public Policy), George Washington University
- **Known for:** Founded and scaled AssemblyAI from a solo project to a company of ~90+ employees, Built the #1 rated API for Automatic Speech Recognition, used by Spotify, Zoom, WSJ, NBCUniversal, and Fireflies.ai, Raised approximately $115M in venture funding, including a $50M Series C led by Accel (Dec 2023)

## Career timeline

- **2015** — Working as a machine learning / senior software engineer at Cisco, focused on ML for collaboration products
- **2017** — Resigned from Cisco and founded AssemblyAI as a solo founder; accepted into Y Combinator after a late application
- **2018-2020** — Ran a lean team on ~$1M in angel funding; took roughly three years to reach $1M in revenue
- **2021** — Raised Series A led by Accel as demand for the speech-to-text API accelerated
- **2023** — Announced $50M Series C led by Accel, bringing total funding to ~$115M
- **2024** — AssemblyAI reported ~4,000+ paying customers, 200,000+ developers, and 25M+ daily API calls

## Achievements

- Founded and scaled AssemblyAI from a solo project to a company of ~90+ employees
- Built the #1 rated API for Automatic Speech Recognition, used by Spotify, Zoom, WSJ, NBCUniversal, and Fireflies.ai
- Raised approximately $115M in venture funding, including a $50M Series C led by Accel (Dec 2023)
- Grew the platform to 200,000+ developers and 25M+ inference calls per day
- Recruited a research team including alumni of DeepMind, Google Brain, and Meta AI

## Latest updates

- **2023-12** — Announced a $50M Series C led by Accel to build superhuman Speech AI models, bringing total funding to roughly $115M.
- **2026-03** — Published writing on evaluating speech models 'Beyond WER' (word error rate), reflecting the company's push past traditional accuracy benchmarks.

## Links

- Website: https://www.dylanbfox.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dylanbfox/

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/dylan-fox
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-07-17