Native Voice, an on-demand voice services ecosystem that enables users to communicate directly by voice with their favorite brands, announced the conclusion of its seed funding round, raising $14 million from Gutbrain Ventures, PBJ Capital, Signal Peak Ventures with participation from Revel Partners, Ideaship (the VC arm of Panasonic’s IP division), TechNexus Venture Collaborative (in partnership with Shure), and others. Native Voice also announced additions to its leadership team.
Native Voice is an on-demand voice services library for access to the brands people rely on every day to help them get more done. With Native Voice, users can unlock access to a growing library of branded voice services, like ‘Hey Spotify’ and ‘Hey Uber,’ tap-to-talk functionality, and always listening wake up capabilities.
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“Voice assistants are great, but limited in what they can do. You have to wake up one assistant to open another and then take your phone out of your pocket to call a car or play a song. Native Voice unlocks multiple voice services, like Alexa and Siri, and the brands that are developing their own, like Spotify and Uber. Users can get more done, using only their voice,” said John Goscha, founder and CEO of Native Voice. “With this latest round, we look forward to expanding our capabilities and bringing on more brand and hardware partners to the Native Voice platform.”
According to Statista, by 2024, digital voice assistants will be installed on 8.4 billion devices, on phones, tablets, computers, appliances and cars. “If you look at the behavior you have with your phone, you’ll notice that you may have dozens of apps, but only a few of them that you use most often. When you want to call a car, you go to your Uber app. But when you think about that experience – you have to unlock the phone, open the app and navigate to the right place within the app to get what you need,” said Goscha. “Imagine instead you could just say ‘hey Uber, get me a car’ to any audio device whether you are walking down the street wearing earbuds or sitting in your living room with a smartspeaker. That’s Native Voice.”
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Native Voice removes friction by helping users connect with their favorite assistants on audio devices, from phones to ear buds, smart speakers and cars, with all their skills or actions. As brands like Starbucks, Uber and Spotify launch their own voice services, users can gain easy access without switching accounts. Native Voice is working with the latest brands in fitness, retail, smart home technology, and others to create the largest collection of voice services.
“We look for passionate, driven founders with disruptive ideas,” said Bob Davoli, Managing Director of Gutbrain Ventures, LLC. “We were impressed with the team John is assembling and the underlying idea behind Native Voice – that using voice assistants should provide frictionless access to users’ favorite brands and apps. We look forward to working with Native Voice to grow the platform to include more hardware and brand partners.”
Native Voice also announced the addition of industry vets Perry Teevens, Chief Revenue Officer, Jeff Brecker, Chief Marketing Officer, Graeme Harnish, vice president of engineering, and Matthew Klee, head of product. Teevens was previously CEO at Dysonics, acquired by Google and head of business markets business development at Skype. Brecker served most recently as VP, Global Creative, Content and Design for Kimberly-Clark and at R/GA he managed the Chicago office, and oversaw the development of their Brand AI offering. Harnish, formerly served as Director of Engineering at True Motion, in addition to software engineering roles at Nordstrom and Starbucks. Klee was Director of User Experience on Alexa devices at Audible, and a Senior User Experience Designer at Microsoft.
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