Vestec Secures up to $6.4 Million Funding

Vestec has secured up to $6.4 million in funding from Sansar Private Equity Partners as part of its second institutional round of fund raising. Sansar has purchased $3 million of stock and obtained warrants with an option to invest another $3.4 million. The new funding will enable Vestec to expand its product portfolio and geographic coverage in the rapidly growing market for speech recognition products and speech=enabled services.

Vestec is focused on demystifying and popularizing speech technologies by leveraging unique artificial intelligence (AI) research tools. The company offers a full range of robust, standards-based products to speech-enable a wide variety of applications in all key industries. The core product portfolio consists of automatic speech recognition, natural language understanding, and text-to-speech engines. All major languages spoken around the world are supported and the core speech products are available in embedded, server, distributed and cloud configurations.

"Speech recognition is a major growth opportunity around the world, and we intend to serve the market with competitively priced innovative products," said Dr. Fakhri Karray, Vestec's primary founder and chairman, in a statement. "Recent advances in artificial intelligence give us the proverbial silver bullet to upend the industry's traditional practice of premium pricing and technology mystification. We are thrilled that Sansar shares our vision and we are looking forward to working with them to build shareholder value."