Berlin's Deepslate Secures €7.7M for Voice AI
The Deepslate-founders, Paskal Paesler and Jan Brachthäuer - © Deepslate (AI generated)
A Berlin AI startup is attracting attention in one of the fastest-growing areas of artificial intelligence: voice technology. Deepslate has raised €7.7 million to further develop its speech-to-speech AI models and expand its team.
The company, founded by Paskal Paesler and Jan Brachthäuser, develops models that process spoken language in real time and respond directly with speech. The goal is to reduce the delays that often make AI voice assistants feel slow or unnatural.
As reported by Handelsblatt, Deepslate takes a different approach from many competitors. Instead of training models entirely from scratch, the startup builds on existing text models and teaches them speech capabilities. The founders say this helps reduce training costs significantly while maintaining strong performance.
The market opportunity is substantial. Investors have poured more than $20 billion into companies working on AI-generated speech since the start of the year, reflecting growing demand for voice-based interfaces. Deepslate aims to stand out with models that can be hosted in Europe or on customers' own infrastructure, an important advantage for regulated sectors such as insurance and financial services.
Customers already include insurance provider Wertgarantie and communications software company Vier. Both companies cite performance, cost efficiency and deployment flexibility as key reasons for choosing Deepslate.
The startup also claims strong results in speed benchmarks. According to Handelsblatt, Deepslate currently ranks first for latency on the Artificial Analysis comparison platform among the models evaluated there. With fresh funding from investors including 42CAP and Alstin Capital, the Berlin company now plans to hire talent, expand its go-to-market team and strengthen its European AI infrastructure.
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