Berlin's deepslate raises €7.7M seed to build European speech-to-speech AI
What's the deal? Berlin AI model lab deepslateDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → has closed a €7.7 million seed round led by Munich-based 42capDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, with participation from alstin capitalDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, siventuresDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, and several business angels. The company trains its own speech-to-speech models that process spoken language directly, without converting it to text.
What's the endgame? Founders Paskal Paesler and Jan Brachthäuser replace the standard three-step chain — speech to text, text model, text to audio — with a single end-to-end model: audio in, audio out. The system runs on three self-trained components, built so a swappable language model can be updated in days rather than months.
Why it matters: Each conversion in a conventional system costs time and loses tone and dialect. Deepslate's model runs at up to 2 cents per call minute, against 6 to 15 cents for comparable US models, and the founders claim it is the fastest of its kind.
Why now? Insurers, contact centres, and platforms already use the technology, and the 15-person team says demand is outpacing its sales capacity. The round will fund model training focused on German street and personal names and dialects, plus new sales and marketing hires.
What could go wrong? Regulated sectors such as insurance and banking leave little room for error — a misheard name or wrong house number carries costly consequences. Deepslate hosts in TelekomDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →'s German cloud or fully inside a customer's infrastructure, and holds ISO 27001 certification.
"Data sovereignty is not a nice-to-have for our customers, but a requirement," said Paesler. "And it is auditable or it is nothing." (translated from German)
The signal: Investors framed the deal as a bet on European independence in voice AI. "Europe needs its own language models, and deepslate is one of the few teams here training its own speech-to-speech model," said Julian von Fischer, general partner at 42cap, pointing to a small team using "a fraction of the compute of large labs."
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