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SapientX

A.I. software that gives a voice and intelligence to products.

Last Funded May 2021

$822,197

raised from 1,647 investors
Pitch Video
Investor Panel

Highlights

1
The highest conversational understanding accuracy at up to 99%. (Siri = 75% and Alexa = 73% - ZDnet).
2
The software is complete and in pre-production development with Volvo, Mitsubishi, Yamaha, Samsung and KTM.
3
We track 23 peers 16 of which have exited in the last 4 years. On average, they returned about 17X to their investors.
4
An early version of our tech was used in Outfit 7's Talking Angela app (a virtual pet) leading to their $1 billion exit.
5
We can run with or without the Internet. Since we can run offline, we can keep user data local where it's safest.
6
Our software is fast and efficient using just 2% of the CPU on your phone and taking as little as 17 MB of disk space.
7
A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) companies typically yield twice the return for their investors over other tech startups.
8
Our assistants speak 40 languages and dialects.

Our Team

We think that voice interfaces need to understand us better, speak more languages, perform important tasks and run in existing products. Existing solutions fall short of this goal. Our mission is to fill this important need.

The Story of SapientX

SapientX was founded by longtime friends, David Colleen, Bruce Wilcox and Maclen Marvit. We wanted to go beyond the keyword-based chatbots used by voicemail systems  to make a voice technology that could interact with users naturally, like they were talking to their best friend.  

LG Automotive prototype for Tesla

First, we had to wait for speech recognition to improve

Back in 2009,  our voice technology worked great in the prototypes that we were building for BMW, Bosch and Denso... except for one thing... the speech recognition technology, that we were using, only understood about 10% of the words we spoke to it. We had to wait until 2016 for the accuracy to surpass 90% making our software viable in consumer products. That's when we formed SapientX and began working with our first customers.


Immediate traction

Our first customer prototypes included a psychiatric app for Your Bestie and talking robots for Roborus and Future Robot. Our first big customer, Mitsubishi Motors, challenged us to build a voice assistant for their next generation of Outlander SUV's. We are currently in a three year development contract to bring the Mitsubishi Mia assistant to market and Mitsubishi has added a second effort to bring Mia to their cars sold in SE Asia.

Mitsubishi Mia voice assistant prototype for Mitsubishi Outlander SUV

Sleeves rolled up... building 20 customer prototypes

In 2018, we closed our first seed investment round and began to work with companies such as Samsung, KTM, Zero electric motorcycles, Singapore Airlines and Magneti Marelli a division of Fiat Chrysler. In 2019, we added Volvo, Yamaha and Indian Motorcycles.

Working with the engineers at Magneti Marelli to install a SapientX voice assistant into a FCA, Chrysler Pacifica van.

Can you speak Japanese?

Over the past three years, dozens of companies told us that they would use our software in their products, if we only spoke Japanese or German or Chinese. We knew, that in order to grow, we would have to take up this challenge. This summer, we were asked by a large navigation systems company to provide our voice assistant in 28 languages for the countries where they sell their products. The situation seemed do or die. After a team huddle, we decided to do what seemed impossible and develop support for not just a few languages but a total of 40 global languages and dialects allowing us to reach 5.5 billion potential users!

Zia, our 40 languages demonstration app.

Earlier this year, we launched a new voice assistant that we call Zia. She's already making a hit with our customers and we are in a proposal to make a version of Zia to teach school kids to speak Spanish. I predict great things for Zia. BTW… Zia’s name is a nod to Ziad Fazah, the controversial holder of the Guinness Book of Records title for the most spoken languages (58)!

Note, these are forward-looking figures that cannot be guaranteed.

New markets open

The voice A.I. market is growing by leaps and bounds but his year, Covid 19 has presented us with new challenges... and new opportunities. Our new Telecaster system lets us bring our assistants to Zoom, WebEx and other video conferencing systems.

Tele, our new "telework" assistant running inside of Zoom.

We are also working with three vending machine companies to add a voice and an avatar interface to vending machines. They say that customers no longer want to touch buttons or screens to buy things. We see this as a playing field... rapidly tilting in our favor.

Building SapientX has been a lot of work but a fun challenge for our team. In June, we plan to complete our fully embedded version of SapientX for Android allowing us to run in appliances and robots. In August, we plan to release our integration with Unity, the top game platform. In September, we plan to have our RayGun Studio authoring tool reach alpha. RayGun Studio will allow non-technical people to be able to author assistants. Our software is planned to ship in our customers products beginning in late 2020. 

Our core team is 12 people now with 35 new consulting translators and voice artists. We have the right team to begin scaling SapientX into a leading, new voice A.I. technology company.

We have everyone we need... except for one person. We need you to join our team as an investor and to share this thrilling ride as we climb taller peaks. Thanks for choosing us!

 

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