AssemblyAI CEO Dylan Fox on 120 Million Voice Conversations a Week
AssemblyAI CEO Dylan Fox on 120 Million Voice Conversations a Week
Podcast46 min 28 sec
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Note: AI-generated summary based on third-party content. Not financial advice. Read more.
Quick Insights

Capitalize on the artificial intelligence infrastructure boom by investing in MongoDB (MDB), which currently powers 75% of Fortune 100 companies and AI startups through its native vector search capabilities. Watch for public market entry opportunities in high-growth private infrastructure leaders like AssemblyAI, which is experiencing explosive 800% growth over three years in voice AI API usage. Keep an eye on the enterprise spend flowing into AI-native financial platforms like Brex, as automation tools capture massive market share among high-tech firms. Leverage the expanding developer ecosystem where coding agents are drastically multiplying the total addressable market for API-driven software. Position your portfolio now in these picks-and-shovels database and infrastructure plays to capture enterprise-level artificial intelligence adoption over the next year.

Detailed Analysis

AssemblyAI (Private - Y Combinator backed)

  • AssemblyAI provides voice AI infrastructure (speech-to-text, voice agents, and speech understanding models) via APIs to developers, enterprises, and small businesses.
  • The company handles over 120 million voice conversations (over 2 million hours of voice) weekly, representing an 800% growth over three years and 4x the daily volume of YouTube.
  • The platform serves over 1 million developers, with 40% signing up in the past year alone.
  • Key innovations include context-aware voice models that can filter out background noise (e.g., distinguishing a drive-thru order from screaming children).
  • The total addressable market (TAM) has expanded 100x because coding agents (like Cursor, Replit, and Claude Code) now allow non-engineers and small businesses to build software using APIs.
  • The company is entirely AI-native internally, utilizing custom AI agents for software deployment, website management, and slide creation with an 80-person team.

Takeaways

  • Voice AI infrastructure is experiencing rapid adoption, moving beyond core product engineering teams into small businesses and global enterprises through agentic coding tools.
  • Companies building scalable, low-latency, and accurate inference layers like AssemblyAI represent critical picks-and-shovels plays in the broader voice AI boom.

Brex (Private)

  • Brex is an intelligent finance platform combining corporate cards, expenses, and banking into a single stack.
  • It features built-in agentic finance, including AI agents that automatically handle expenses, enforce spending policies, and close books in minutes.
  • The platform is used by prominent AI companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, Vercel, Granola, Deepgram, and AssemblyAI.

Takeaways

  • AI-native financial platforms automating back-office tasks like expense reporting and receipt chasing are capturing significant market share among high-growth tech companies.

MongoDB (MDB)

  • MongoDB is a database platform designed for modern developers and AI agents.
  • It allows companies to store, search, and reason over data in real time using vector search and embeddings from Voyage AI within a single system.
  • It powers 75% of Fortune 100 companies and leading AI-native startups.

Takeaways

  • Integrated database platforms offering native vector search and embedding capabilities without requiring complex, multi-tool data pipelines are becoming essential infrastructure for AI applications.
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Episode Description
Dylan Fox is the founder and CEO of AssemblyAI, the voice AI infrastructure platform behind AI notetakers, medical scribes, drive through ordering, contact centers and humanoid robots. AssemblyAI went through Y Combinator's first AI batch in 2017 and now serves over 1 million developers with roughly 100 million API calls a day. We get into the volume numbers, why weekly conversations are up over 800% in three years, the three macro trends pulling voice into everything, why coding agents turned small businesses into API customers, how data mixture drives 75% of model quality, the humanoid robot speaker problem, on device models, and the disclosure question the entire voice agent industry is avoiding. "It's very easy to optimize for a public open source benchmark. It's very hard to optimize across all these real world applications." We cover › 120 million weekly conversations and 4X YouTube's daily voice volume › Coding agents expanding the TAM by 100X › Context aware voice models and the McDonald's ordering problem › Why humanoid robots can't disambiguate speakers › Whether voice agents should disclose they are AI Dylan Fox: https://x.com/YouveGotFox Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea  Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊 YouTube: https://youtu.be/v6z_eoUX5LE 𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒 • Brex—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery  • MongoDB–Millions of developers and more than 65,200+ customers across industries, including ~75% of the Fortune 100, rely on MongoDB for their most important applications. With integrated capabilities for operational data, search, real-time analytics, & AI-powered data retrieval, MongoDB helps organizations everywhere move faster, innovate more efficiently, & simplify complex architectures. https://mongodb.com/ai • AssemblyAI–Millions of developers use AssemblyAI to power their voice ai applications and features. One API gives you access to best-in-class speech-to-text, voice agent, and speech understanding models for both pre-recorded and real-time audio.  Granola, ClickUp & HeyGen are scaling with AssemblyAI - get $50 of free credits today at http://AssemblyAI.com/sourcery
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