In a world drowning in text, David AI is tuning into a different frequency, audio. And they’re not just amplifying, they’re engineering the soundtrack of tomorrow’s AI. The San Francisco-based startup just raised a $25M Series A to fuel what might be the most important layer in the generativeAI stack that nobody’s talking about: high-quality, structured audio data.
Founded in 2024 by Tomer C. and Ben Wiley, two ex-Scale AI minds who clearly didn’t come to play, David AI isn’t your average data vendor. Cohen spotted the crack in the foundation while building business units at Scale AI. Wiley, whose engineering fingerprints are all over Scale’s public-sector GenAI platform and Microsoft’s enterprise cloud, knew how to build the scaffolding. Together, they didn’t just see a market gap, they heard one.
The investors? Alt Capital and Amplify Partners co-led this Series A round, with First Round Capital, Y Combinator, BoxGroup, and a posse of angels with audio AI cred. Jack Altman of Alt Capital even took a board seat, because when you bet on the auditory future of AI, you don’t just invest; you plug in.
David AI is now valued of $100M and pulling in eight-figure revenue less than a year in. That’s not just traction, that’s velocity. They’ve already locked in partnerships with most of the “Magnificent Seven” tech giants, yet their names stay sealed tighter than an Apple keynote. But the industry’s listening.
The company’s not selling generic recordings, they’re pushing over 100k hrs of studio-grade audio across 15+ languages, full of dialect and accent metadata, custom-tagged for everything from emotional tone to acoustic anomalies. Think voiceAI training with the granularity of a Daft Punk mix and the discipline of a physics lab.
They didn’t stumble on this by chance. Their datasets, Converse, Atlas, Chorus, Dialog, aren’t just labeled folders. They’re research-grade audio instruments, born out of hypothesis, experimentation, iteration, and production at scale. End-to-end speech models need full-duplex, channel-separated, emotionally nuanced audio? David AI’s already there.
With $30M raised to date and new roles opening across research, backend, ML, and ops, this isn’t a startup, it’s a data engine with a legal footprint in Delaware and an operational beat that doesn’t miss. And the mission? Equip AI phone agents, wearables, and humanoid robots with voices that don’t just talk, they resonate.
Tomer and Ben didn’t just found a company. They’re scoring the AI age. While the rest of the world’s still whispering about AGI, David AI is cranking up the volume on the infrastructure that’ll get us there. Because in a world of endless noise, structured sound is signal, and David AI is the one holding the mic.
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