Natural Language Processing startup Wit.ai has raised a $3 Million seed round, led by Andreessen Horowitz (Chris Dixon), with participation from Ignition Partners, NEA, A-Grade, SVAngel, Eric Hahn, Alven Capital, and TenOneTen. The startup, co-founded by Alex Lebrun, Willy Blandin & Laurent Landowski, went through Y-Combinator previous, and also announced LISTEN Conference, taking place on November 6th in San Francisco.
As a product, Wit’s API enables end-users to interface via voice command on mobile apps (iOS, Android, etc.), wearables (Pebble), connected objects, robots (Nao), and almost anything else you can imagine.
The company’s founders previously founded VirtuOz, a virtual assistant company that was sold to Nuance Communications (a company specialized in voice & image recognition). Wit.ai is poised to rewrite the voice-layer of the internet, currently fragmented across multiple devices (Siri vs. SAMI vs. Google Voice, ….), enabling smartwatches with tiny screens or objects that are smartphone-controlled to become voice-controlled.
I spoke yesterday with Luc Julia, who heads up SAMI at Samsung and spoke at the Connected Conference earlier this year, who said that the 200+ devices that he has rigged in his home are all voice-enabled through a connected between Wit & SAMI.
I’m bullish on Wit, and look forward to seeing how they will grow in the coming months.