Voice AI Giant Deepgram Plants APAC HQ in Singapore Backed by EDBI Investment
Source: Business Wire
Voice AI infrastructure firm Deepgram is establishing its Asia-Pacific headquarters in Singapore, backed by a strategic investment from EDBI as part of its US$130 million Series C extension. The move follows 96% year-on-year APAC growth.
Voice AI is quietly becoming one of the most demanding corners of the AI boom. Unlike chatbots that can pause to think, a voice agent answering a call centre in Malay, a hospital triage line in Mandarin, or a bank's customer support in Singlish has to understand speech in real time, across accents and background noise, and reply fast enough that the caller doesn't notice a machine. That infrastructure problem is exactly what Deepgram has built its business around — and it is now anchoring that bet in Singapore.
On 18 August, Deepgram, the real-time AI infrastructure company behind speech-to-text, text-to-speech and speech-to-speech models, said it will establish its Asia-Pacific headquarters in Singapore. The move follows a strategic investment from EDBI, the investment arm under SG Growth Capital that sits within EDB and Enterprise Singapore, as part of an extension to Deepgram's US$130 million Series C round. The company has appointed Sriram Ved, a former Salesforce leader, as vice-president and general manager for APAC to run regional strategy.
The Singapore decision is rooted in numbers, not hype. Deepgram says API requests across APAC grew 96% year on year, and it already serves customers in more than 20 regional markets including Australia, Japan, Indonesia and Thailand. From Singapore it plans to bring regional leadership, customer support, partnerships and commercial operations closer to clients, deepen its speech recognition across Asian languages, and expand its low-latency inference footprint across the region.
The EDBI backing is the tell. Singapore's government has been deliberately courting the infrastructure layer of AI — the companies that build the models and services underneath the flashy applications — rather than just the consumer-facing products. Deepgram's presence means more than one foreign firm opening an office: it signals that Singapore is being treated as the regional command centre for enterprise AI operations, with speech support already covering all four of Singapore's official languages.
Why it matters for Singapore: Deepgram joins a growing roster of AI infrastructure companies using Singapore as their APAC base, and EDBI's direct investment shows the state is willing to put capital behind those bets rather than just offering tax breaks. For local enterprises — from banks and hospitals to contact centres handling multilingual callers — it means access to production-grade voice AI from a vendor headquartered in their own time zone, with privacy and data-residency options on top. The real prize is compounding: each such company deepens the country's pool of AI talent and regional decision-makers, reinforcing Singapore's position as the hub the rest of Asia builds on.
