Voice Analytics Firm to Expand Footprint in Finance, Defense and Insurance
A voice-based risk assessment vendor led by a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Marine Corps reserves raised $60 million to address needs in the insurance and banking sectors.
See Also: OnDemand – The Quiet Gaps in SaaS Data Protection No One Talks About
San Diego-based Clearspeed has transitioned its voice analytics technology from the military to commercial applications in fraud prevention and risk management as demand in conservative sectors like banking and defense grows, said co-founder and CEO Alex Martin. He said Clearspeed’s focus on enhancing trust rather than just detecting deception is vital as voice becomes the dominant interface.
“We need the capital to fuel that growth, to expand in the U.K. market and into other geos, and then land in the U.S. market, which we’re doing,” Martin said. “The second thing that we were targeting was, ‘is there a fit for us in other sectors like banking?’ So, we had to prove that out, and we achieved that.”
Clearspeed, founded in 2016, employs 72 people and has raised $110 million in outside funding, having most recently closed a $27 million Series C funding round led by Ian McKinnon and Thomas O’Malley. The company has been led since its inception by Martin, who spent more than seven years as an active duty Marine Corps captain and has served in the reserves as a lieutenant colonel for more than 14 years.
What Makes Clearspeed’s Approach to Risk Analytics Unique
Martin said Clearspeed has reached an inflection point by validating its core technology across multiple sectors, achieving product ubiquity in insurance, gaining initial traction with early adopters in banking, and broadening application in government beyond traditional military use. This progress prompted the need for capital to build the team, scale infrastructure, and invest in research and development, he said.
“On this journey from the last fundraising to now, it was about products in the insurance market that have ubiquity and promise,” Martin said. “So we had to prove that out as a thing, and we did.”
Initially built to combat insider threats in warzones where traditional polygraphs and counterintelligence were inadequate, Martin said the core technology now solves a similar problem in enterprise settings: balancing operational speed and risk mitigation. Clearspeed facilitates faster insurance claims processing while mitigating fraud, he said, and helps banks contend with both professional and opportunistic fraud.
“You have to compromise between how fast you move through screening process or claims process and how much accuracy or fidelity you want to fight the fraud or deal with the threat,” Martin said. “So, that tension that exists that we built this for is exactly the same tension in insurance. And come to find out, it’s the same progression into banking, lots of transactions and fraud.”
Rather than trying to identify deception outright, Martin said Clearspeed’s technology is designed to detect trustworthiness. Martin repeatedly stressed that Clearspeed is not in the business of truth or lie detection, but of “risk and trust.” This philosophical shift has enabled the company to fill the critical gaps left by conventional AI systems, which he said are typically dependent on behavioral or historical data.
“The risk engine that we plug into will be identifying fraud, but from a flip lens, which is clear the hay, not find the needle,” Martin said. “Sensing this trust signal and injecting that does inject trust into the infrastructure. We believe everything will move to a voice-based interface that allows humans to transact and move through these processes faster.”
Why the U.K. Is Easier to Break Into than the U.S.
As humans shift from text and human agents to voice-activated processes, the security and integrity of those exchanges become paramount, Martin said. Despite rapid innovation in voice platforms like Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant, and Amazon’s Alexa, there’s no risk filter to detect intent, fraud or threat at the speed and scale required. Clearspeed is positioning its voice analytics as this missing trust layer.
“While technology has this growth curve of just this exponential growth curve of innovation, there is a gap, because human nature remains the same, like the human being will remain unchanged,” Martin said. “They still may decide to make a bad decision and commit fraud, they still may decide to withhold sensitive information that could be harmful to their organization or a country.”
Martin views the U.K. as an ideal launchpad because of its centralized regulatory structure and culture that embraces innovation. U.K. insurers, having a long-standing history and pride in their industry, are more open to new technologies that enhance trust and speed. In contrast, the U.S. market is fragmented and conservative, with state-by-state insurance regulators and a risk-averse culture that delays adoption.
“They kind of invented insurance, right?” Martin said. “They have sense of pride and ownership, but they also just are willing, just from a cultural perspective, to take a little bit more risk for their customers earlier on the adoption curve than the U.S., who tend to be more conservative, vote more on a block, have a little bit more of like, ‘The way that we’re doing business now is working. Why change it?'”
Martin said Clearspeed aims to double its revenue year-over-year for the next three years. On the talent front, Clearspeed plans to nearly double its headcount within two years, with a strong focus on hiring mission-aligned, high-quality professionals rather than simply scaling numbers. And from a technical standpoint, Martin emphasized maintaining high precision and speed in their voice analysis product.
“The speed at which we turn around used to be hours, then it was minutes, and now its seconds, working to near real-time,” Martin said. “These are the metrics that will fuel it. Everything metric-wise is all around the TAM, which seems to be growing month-over-month, the technology, deepening the moat, improving the speed, while not losing the precision.”