Companies

David AI

withdavid.ai

David AI builds research-grade audio datasets powering speech, multilingual, and conversational artificial intelligence systems.

HQSan Francisco, California, United States
Employees11-50
Funding$80.5M
Valuation$500m
13 active roles
Profile 6mo agoJobs checked 16h ago
AI / MLAI ApplicationB2B SaaSSeries B$50M-$200M

About

David AI develops research-grade audio datasets for speech recognition, translation, voice synthesis, and conversational AI. It sells to Fortune 100 companies and AI research labs, differentiating through an R&D-style process that experimentally designs, evaluates, and continuously improves high-signal datasets.

Market

David AI competes in the audio-AI training-data and data-infrastructure market, supplying datasets for speech recognition, translation, synthesis, and conversational AI. It positions itself as an audio-focused data research company rather than a general data-labeling provider, differentiating through research-driven dataset design, targeted collection, iterative quality and model-efficacy evaluation, and production-scale audio infrastructure.

Target Customers

David AI primarily serves Fortune 100 and FAANG companies, leading AI labs, and enterprises building speech recognition, translation, voice synthesis, and conversational-AI systems. The likely buyers are AI/ML research, data, and product teams that need specialized, high-quality audio training data and supporting infrastructure.

At a Glance

Problem

David AI addresses the shortage of high-quality audio data needed to train speech, voice, and conversational AI. Audio is becoming the interface for real-world AI, but the supply of suitable training data is a severe bottleneck: a 2024 Meta AI paper cited by the company said that all major publicly available spoken-dialogue datasets combined represented only about 3,000 hours, while advanced full-duplex systems may require millions of hours. The pain is both technical and operational: developers need natural, channel-separated, multilingual, accent- and dialect-rich recordings, yet collecting and refining that data requires recruiting speakers, recording conversations, and producing reliable metadata.

The clearest use case is improving voice systems that must understand natural, overlapping, or multilingual speech, including speech-to-speech models and conversational agents such as AI phone-support systems. The commercial logic is straightforward: voice-AI developers are increasingly “voracious” for data, and buying a specialized dataset can be faster and simpler than building an audio-collection operation internally.

Product / Service

David AI is an audio-data research company that sells licensed training datasets and supports custom data projects. Its process begins by identifying an audio capability to unlock, designing the data needed to teach it, running targeted collection experiments, measuring quality and model-training efficacy, iterating toward a high-signal set, scaling it to thousands of hours, and releasing the dataset for ongoing improvement. Its featured products include Converse, with channel-separated natural two-speaker English conversations; Atlas, covering more than 15 languages with dialect and accent metadata; and Chorus, covering conversations with three or more speakers for applications such as speaker separation and diarization.

The delivery model combines off-the-shelf access with a light enterprise-sales process: a prospective customer requests samples, signs a data-license agreement for the relevant use case, and receives standard datasets within one to two days. David AI also offers custom collection, labeling, and metadata pipelines for specialized model-training requirements. The benefit is to give AI labs and large companies research-grade, task-specific audio without forcing them to assemble and manage the entire collection and quality-assurance stack themselves.

Market

David AI competes in the specialized AI-training-data and audio-data market, supplying the data layer for speech recognition, translation, speech synthesis, speech-to-speech, and conversational AI. Its closest competitive set includes other audio-data providers and marketplaces such as Defined.ai, Shaip, and Magic Data; CB Insights also lists Argilla among David AI’s alternatives. Defined.ai and Shaip overlap particularly closely because they offer ready-made audio datasets as well as custom collection services, while broader data-labeling companies and speech-model vendors are adjacent rather than exact substitutes.

David AI is not pre-revenue based on the available evidence. Its website says its datasets are used by Fortune 100 companies and research labs, and Forbes reported more than 100,000 hours of audio across more than 15 languages, customers among most of the “Magnificent Seven” technology companies, and an annualized revenue run rate above $10 million by May 2025, although the company did not publicly name those clients. The company subsequently announced a $50 million Series B in October 2025, providing further evidence of investor and market traction; public sources do not provide audited revenue or a complete customer list.

Founders & Leadership

Tomer CohenFounder
Co-founder and CEO
Ben WileyFounder
Co-founder and CTO

Funding History

2024-09
Seed$500K

Qiming Venture Partners

2025-01
Seed$5M

First Round Capital

2025-05
Series A$25M

Alt Capital, Amplify Partners

2025-10
Series B$50M

Meritech Capital Partners, NVIDIA

Recent News

2025-10-09funding
YC-backed David AI raises $50M to build diverse audio datasets for next-gen AI

David AI raised $50 million in a Series B led by Meritech and NVIDIA, with participation from Alt Capital, First Round Capital, Amplify Partners, and Y Combinator. The company plans to expand research, engineering, product, and collaboration with AI labs and hardware companies.

2025-10-08funding
Announcing Our $50M Series B Led by Meritech

David AI announced a $50 million Series B from Meritech and NVIDIA, alongside existing investors. The company said the funding will support its audio data research lab and the development of datasets and evaluations for real-world audio AI.

2025-10-08
David AI Raises $50 Million to Bring Audio Data to AI Models

Bloomberg reported that David AI raised $50 million from investors to provide audio datasets for training artificial intelligence models. The announcement highlights the company’s focus on building the data layer for audio AI.

Active Roles

13
San Francisco/HR & Recruiting/1d ago
San Francisco/Product/20d ago
San Francisco/HR & Recruiting/21d ago
San Francisco/Engineering/21d ago
San Francisco/Engineering/21d ago
San Francisco/Product/44d ago
San Francisco/Engineering/76d ago
San Francisco/Engineering/78d ago
San Francisco/Product/196d ago
Deployment Strategist$145k – $175k
San Francisco/Implementation Engineer/196d ago
San Francisco/Engineering/196d ago
San Francisco/Data & Analytics/196d ago
Research Scientist$210k – $360k
San Francisco/Data & Analytics/196d ago

Business Model

David AI generates revenue by selling proprietary audio datasets and associated data services to enterprise technology companies and AI research labs. It also offers custom dataset design and development; public sources do not disclose specific pricing.

Products

Research-grade audio dataset development and custom data-collection programsConverse: channel-separated, natural two-speaker English conversationsAtlas: multilingual audio data spanning 15+ languages, with dialect and accent metadataChorus: multi-speaker conversational data for speaker separation and diarization

Customers

Several of the Magnificent Seven companies (individual names not publicly disclosed)Most leading audio AI labs (individual names not publicly disclosed)FAANG companies and AI startups (individual names not publicly disclosed)

Tech Stack

Speech and audio machine-learning modelsLLMsDigital signal processing (DSP)Real-time audio pipelinesNext.jsTypeScriptTailwindCSSNode.jstRPCPostgreSQLAWSTrigger.devWebRTCFFmpeg

Competitors

Argilla
Defined.ai
Magic Data

Key Investors

NVIDIA, Meritech Capital Partners, Alt Capital, Amplify Partners, First Round Capital, Y Combinator