San Francisco-based audio data research lab David AI has raised $50 million in a Series B round led by Meritech and NVIDIA. Existing investors, including Alt Capital, First Round Capital, Amplify Partners, and Y Combinator, also participated. This brings David AI’s total funding to approximately $80 million, including a $25 million Series A and an earlier $5 million raise in 2025.
With the new funding, David AI plans to expand its research operations, grow engineering and product teams, deepen collaboration with AI labs and hardware companies worldwide, and enhance its frameworks to better evaluate the real-world performance of AI speech models.
World’s first audio data research lab
Founded in 2024 by Tomer Cohen (CEO) and Ben Wiley (CTO), both formerly of Scale AI, David AI is the world’s first dedicated audio data research lab focused on building the data layer for next-generation audio AI. The company creates high-quality, diverse audio datasets that reflect the real-world diversity of human speech, encompassing languages, cultural contexts, emotions, and various acoustic environments. This enables AI models to adapt naturally to a wide range of real-world scenarios.
“Audio AI has the incredible opportunity to bring AI into the ‘real world’, making AI accessible to billions of people. That said, the audio interfaces of the future require exponentially more data and evaluations than what is available today, to live up to this potential,” the company said.
David AI employs a research-driven approach that rigorously curates datasets and scales them with extreme attention to detail. They serve many leading AI labs and several of the “Mag 7” tech giants, powering voice AI models across various industries, including robotics, wearables, generative media, and customer support automation. The company recently crossed an eight-figure annual revenue run rate and continues to grow rapidly.
In the competitive landscape, David AI’s main competitors include Defined.ai, PublicAI, Human Native AI, Ydata, and Syntheticus.
“We’re excited for this next chapter of growing David AI to better serve our customers,” said the founders. “ If we do our job well, audio AI will proliferate, fueling all the real-world use cases we’re excited to see come to life, like humanoid robots, wearables, personal assistants, and generative media.”
