Early Game Ventures investment fund (earlygame.vc) announces signing an investment round worth 200,000 euros in Vatis Tech (https://vatis.tech/), a startup that develops speech recognition technology. Sparking Capital and Mălin Ștefănescu participated in the round, and the DLA Piper team, formed by Cristina Bucur and Ciprian Frandeș, provided the legal assistance of the transaction.
“At Vatis Tech, we focus on developing recognition algorithms for European languages such as French, Italian, German, Dutch, or Polish. We started, of course, with the Romanian language, and we proved that our solution has better results than Google technology. In tests performed so far, the accuracy of Google’s transcription is 84% , while that of Vatis Tech has exceeded 94%. The speech recognition algorithms developed by us are specialized in industries and verticals, such as media, finance, technology, or the medical field,” said Adrian Ispas, founder and CEO of Vatis Tech.
The Vatis Tech service is available online and can be tested by anyone. Developers can use the API to integrate Vatis technology into their products and services, benefiting from dedicated support and taking advantage of advantageous prices.
“We are happy whenever we have the opportunity to invest in companies that develop technologies, and not just new business models. Deep tech startups are extremely scalable; they can address a variety of needs and use cases in a lot of industries and fields,” said Dan Călugăreanu, EGV Partner. “Voice recognition technology is a mature one, reaching mass adoption. From this perspective, a startup that brings the rest of European languages to the level of English in terms of accuracy addresses an acute need. In the future, many other startups and corporations will use Vatis Tech algorithms to integrate them into their own products and services. Thus, the EGV investment in Vatis Tech is part of our thesis <Infrastructure for innovation>”, adds Dan Călugăreanu.
Vatis Tech will use 200,000 euros to develop Romanian language algorithms and market the technology. Later, the company will develop algorithms for other European languages and expand its operations abroad.
Early Game Ventures (EGV) is a venture capital firm funded mostly through the Competitiveness Operational Program 2014-2020, co-funded by the European Regional Development Fund.
The European Investment Fund (EIF) is part of the European Investment Bank Group and is the leading risk financier for Europe’s SMEs through venture capital, collateral, and microfinance instruments. In Romania, the EIF implements financial instruments co-financed through structural and investment funds, such as JEREMIE 2007-2013, SME Initiative, ROP, JOP, NRDP.
The Competitiveness Operational Program 2014-2020 (POC) makes investments to address the needs and challenges raised by the low levels of economic competitiveness, in particular with regards to (a) insufficient support for research, development and innovation and (b) underdeveloped infrastructure for Information and Communication Technology. POC benefits from a € 1.33 billion allocation from the European Regional Development Fund.
