speech-recognition
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Andreas Cleve Is Building the Quiet Layer Beneath Healthcare AI
Long before the ambient-scribe rush, Andreas Cleve made a stubborn bet: the useful AI in a consultation would listen carefully, understand context and stay out of the way. A decade later, Corti is turning that bet into infrastructure.
Vu Van
Vu Van is the Vietnamese-born co-founder and CEO of ELSA (English Language Speech Assistant), an AI-powered app that gives non-native speakers instant feedback on English pronunciation, fluency and intonation. She built the idea out of her own struggle to be understood as a Stanford graduate student, teamed up with speech-recognition scientist Xavier Anguera, and has grown ELSA into one of the world's largest AI language platforms, with tens of millions of users across roughly 190 countries. She is a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer and Endeavor entrepreneur.
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.
Eunjoon Cho
Eunjoon (EJ) Cho is the co-founder and CEO of Tofu, a San Mateo AI platform that automates personalized, multichannel B2B marketing at scale. A Stanford PhD who trained speech-recognition neural networks at Google and worked at Meta, Affirm and Fast, Cho spent years mapping the generative-AI landscape before ChatGPT opened the door. He started Tofu with Honglei Liu and Elaine Zelby in 2023, raised about $17M from SignalFire, Index Ventures and HubSpot Ventures, and grew revenue 12x in roughly a year by replacing the bloated stack of point tools marketers juggle with one platform that ships finished assets.
Umesh Sachdev
Umesh Sachdev is the CEO and co-founder of Uniphore, a Palo Alto-based business AI company he started in Chennai in 2008 with college friend Ravi Saraogi. What began as a multilingual speech recognition startup incubated at IIT Madras has grown into one of the largest AI-native enterprise SaaS companies in the world, serving over 2,500 customers and approaching $1 billion in bookings. In October 2025 Uniphore closed a $260 million Series F co-led by NVIDIA, AMD, Snowflake and Databricks.
Yi Wang
Yi Wang is the co-founder and CEO of Liulishuo (LingoChamp / LAIX), the Shanghai-based company that built one of the world's first AI-powered English teachers. A Princeton PhD and ex-Google product manager, he returned to China in 2011 and shipped an app that climbed to the top of China's App Store within months, eventually serving tens of millions of learners and taking the company public on the NYSE in 2018.
Dan O'Connell
Dan O'Connell is the CEO of Front, the AI-powered customer communications platform used by 9,000+ companies. A veteran of Google, AdRoll, and Dialpad - where he helped scale ARR from $30M to $200M+ - O'Connell joined Front as CEO in May 2024, succeeding co-founder Mathilde Collin, with a mandate to drive the company's next phase of AI-led growth. He is a UC Berkeley Haas MBA, Santa Clara University alumnus, Ironman triathlete, and a recurring voice in the conversation about how AI will reshape human work rather than replace it.
Nikola Mrkšić
Nikola Mrkšić is the co-founder and CEO of PolyAI, a voice AI company building enterprise-grade conversational agents that handle customer service calls so naturally that callers sometimes apologize mid-sentence for being rude to what they assume is a person. Born in Belgrade in 1991, Mrkšić earned a full scholarship to Cambridge, completed a PhD on spoken dialogue systems, co-built VocalIQ before Apple acquired it, and then founded PolyAI in 2017 with two Cambridge lab colleagues. The company has raised $206M across four rounds - most recently an $86M Series D in December 2025 at a $750M valuation - and its voice agents now handle calls for Marriott, FedEx, Caesars Entertainment, and over 200 enterprise customers across 45+ languages in 25+ countries.
Punit Soni
Punit Singh Soni is the founder and CEO of Suki, the ambient clinical intelligence platform that lets doctors spend more time with patients and less time typing into electronic health records. A product veteran who helped ship the Moto X and rebuild Flipkart's consumer experience, Soni founded Suki in 2017 on a single thesis - 'AI is the new UI' - before that phrase became a conference staple. Suki now serves 350+ health systems across the US, has raised $255 million in total funding, and helps clinicians complete notes 72% faster. Soni was educated at NIT Kurukshetra, the University of Wyoming, and Wharton, and has lived at the intersection of big tech, emerging markets, and healthcare for over two decades.
Scott Stephenson
Scott Stephenson is the co-founder and CEO of Deepgram, the voice AI company building foundational speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and voice agent models from scratch. A particle physicist who once helped build a dark-matter detector two miles underground, he now runs an AI company used by NASA, Spotify, and Twilio.
Todd Mozer
Todd Mozer is Chairman and CEO of Sensory, Inc., the Santa Clara-based company he co-founded in 1994 that has quietly powered voice recognition in over 3 billion consumer devices - from the 'OK Google' and 'Hey Siri' wake words to smart home gadgets, automotive systems, and medical devices. A second-generation tech entrepreneur (son of physicist Forrest Mozer, with whom he also co-founded ESS Technology), Todd holds 50+ patents and an MBA from Stanford. He has spent 30+ years making AI run tiny, private, and always-on - long before the rest of the industry caught up.
Sam Liang
Sam Liang is the co-founder and CEO of Otter.ai, the AI meeting intelligence platform that crossed $100M ARR in 2025 with just under 200 employees. A Stanford-trained electrical engineer who co-invented Google Maps' Blue Dot and sold his first startup Alohar Mobile to Alibaba in 2013, Liang founded Otter in 2016 after drowning in 30-40 weekly meetings with no reliable way to capture what was said. Today Otter serves 35 million users across enterprise, education, and government, processing tens of billions of minutes of conversation - and has evolved from a transcription tool into an autonomous AI meeting agent suite that can answer questions, coach salespeople, and conduct product demos in real time.