Amsterdam-based Reson8 has raised €5M in pre-seed funding to challenge US-centric speech platforms by building a high-precision, industry-specific speech recognition platform tailored for European languages.
Reson8, a hyper-customised speech AI startup that ensures real-life, accurate, industry-specific language recognition, has raised pre-seed funding to scale its infrastructure and expand its speech models across more than 20 European languages.
Led by Balderton Capital with participation from NP Hard, the round supports Reson8’s mission to provide a localized alternative to generic, English-focused speech models.
Reson8 is an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) platform that enables companies to deploy specialized speech models by adapting itself to conversations instantly, while allowing customization for European languages, including dialects and industry-specific jargon.
It also introduces speech recognition of specialized terminology and names, frictionless fast-moving dialogue, and the possibility of being tailored to different professions, organizations, or even individual conversations.
A new approach to acoustic precision
The company’s central proposition is straightforward: It brings a new approach for speech AI, prioritizing acoustic precision and control by enabling its models to reflect how language is spoken in real life. The models can be live-customized by providing context like documents, websites, and calendars.
Reson8 was founded by three technical experts: Thomas Kluiters, Raoul Ritter, and Jarno Verhagen, who identified a problem in the generic, all-encompassing speech AI models in the market.
With the main belief of “your language, your jargon”, Reson8’s main goal is to solve the perceived failures of generic ASR. It was built with the main idea that speech recognition should adapt to people, rather than users adapting to the software.
Solving the “Generic AI” gap in Europe
The platform addresses the friction caused by implementing US-centric generic models in Europe, such as manual corrections or inaccurate translations in non-English contexts. Instead of retraining or layering language models, Reson8 works by applying small, pluggable adapters that adjust speech recognition to the specific context of each conversation, improving accuracy without latency or guesswork.
Sovereign infrastructure and compliance
The company was built and operates with its own European infrastructure. This enables the company to acknowledge the guidelines for a European-hosted AI, offering full-stack hosted ownership, clear data residency, and an advantage in regulations and procurement requirements. Reson8 can be deployed in language-specific industries such as:
- Healthcare: It adopts drug names, terminology for each specialization, and clinical shorthand (which is the standardized abbreviations, acronyms, and symbols used in healthcare for fast communication).
- Legal: It handles firm-specific language, contractual terms, and legal and jurisdiction-specific vocabulary.
- Customer support: It manages product names, technical terms, and brand-specific language, guaranteeing a personalized service for each company within the industry.
The funding round was led by Balderton Capital, a multistage venture firm with more than 25 years of experience supporting Europe’s best founders from Seed to IPO, in collaboration with NP Hard.
James Wise, partner at Balderton Capital, explained how the firm is excited to support Reson8’s Europe-first approach to a category-defining global speech sector, highlighting the team’s technical depth and unique European-centric approach.
The €5M pre-seed round will be used to expand Reson8’s European hardware footprint, continue development of the inference stack and foundational speech models, and grow the team selectively by prioritizing talent instead of quantity.
