SapientX Founder David Colleen Discusses the Importance of Listening

We make and license artificial intelligence (AI) software that adds a voice and intelligence to our customers’ products.

We are razer-focused on shipping our software in our customers’ products.

Back in 2008, we were developing navigation systems for the auto and handheld markets. We were frustrated with the lack of accuracy in the voice systems available to us then, and these systems required people to learn commands. We decided that we needed to design a more accurate type of voice system that could understand people as they spoke conversationally so that they would never have to learn commands.

SapientX was co-founded with my long-time friends Bruce Wilcox and Maclen Marvit. Bruce had headed AI at several large game companies, and then he became the chief architect of what was to become SapientX. Maclen was an early virtual reality CTO and then headed engineering teams at Fujitsu and the Blue Origin rocket company.

JD Powers did a study showing that the voice assistants shipping in American cars only understand, on average, 37% of user commands. Due to this poor accuracy, only one in 10 drivers bother to use these systems. Newer systems from Google and Amazon have improved accuracy (88% and 72.5%), but they need the internet to run, and they harvest user data and sell it to third parties. All of these systems are poor solutions for cars.

SapientX is able to achieve up to 99% accuracy. It’s white label, speaks 40 languages, does not collect sensitive user data, works with or without the internet, and optionally supports the use of avatars.

We are still working hard on shipping our assistants in your next family car, but this has been delayed by COVID and the computer chip shortage. To replace this business, we added some new markets that had shorter time-to-market periods and that remained active in spite of COVID, such as vending machines, appliances, and digital signage. We had early prototyping wins in these new markets, with COVID supply vending machines for Amazon and with Haier, the largest appliance maker in the world. We also have prototype contracts with large auto parts makers Visteon and Murakami. We recently launched Sage, our digital signage solution, resulting in early interest in the retail and transportation sectors.

Cerence is the status quo in the auto market. They do not support the full set of needs of their customers and their users. In contrast, we listen carefully to our customers and supply software that meets all of their needs with higher accuracy and better user satisfaction while protecting sensitive user data.

SapientX is ready for market, so the funds will primarily be used to market, sell, and integrate what we have into our customers’ products.

We listen. We listen to our customers to make better products. We listen to our investors to make a better company. I keep our investors informed, I follow leads that they generate, and I personally respond to all of their emails.

While our main focus is in making SapientX a market-leading company, it has not escaped our notice that many of our peers have been acquired. ​We track 35 of these peers, 27 of whom have had large exits. We think that to bring our software to the most users, it makes sense that we should eventually become part of a larger company. 

We are also open to an initial public offering (IPO), but according to Crunchbase, IPOs only deliver about half of the returns to investors as acquisitions do. By the way, my co-founder Bruce Wilcox’s last company (Outfit 7) had a $1 billion exit running an earlier version of our software!