Spectrum Labs Raises $32M For Ai-Based Content Moderation That Monitors Billions Of Conversations Daily For Toxicity

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Today, a startup called Spectrum Labs — which provides artificial intelligence technology to platform providers to detect and shut down toxic exchanges in real time (specifically, 20 milliseconds or less) — is announcing $32 million in funding. Greycroft led Spectrum’s previous round of $10 million in September 2020, and the company has now raised $46 million in total. Davis notes that its audio work is “read” as audio, not transcribed to text first, which gives Spectrum’s customers a significant jump on responding to the activity, and counteracting what Davis referred to as “The Wild West nature of voice,” due to how slow responses typically are for those not using Spectrum’s technology: a platform has to wait for users to flag iffy content, then the platform has to find that audio in the transcriptions, and then it can take action — a process that could take days. The opportunity in enterprise is an interesting one, as it includes not just how people within a company converse with each other (which largely might take a similar form to the consumer-facing services that Spectrum Labs already provides), but also how a company interfaces with the outside world in areas like sales, customer service and marketing, and then leveraging the information that Spectrum Labs gathers in its analytics to potentially alter how each of those areas subsequently operates.To be sure, this is not a market segment that has been ignored. We noted when we last wrote about Spectrum Labs that the founders and founding team came from Krux, a marketing technology company that was acquired by Salesforce (where they worked before leaving to found Spectrum Labs).