AI-powered speech-to-text platform Parrot raises $11M Series A

AI affects medicine, law, business, IT, and more. AI-powered transcription is one example.

Parrot, a transcription platform for legal and insurance depositions, raised $11 million in a Series A round on Tuesday. Legal experts can now summarize depositions in seconds.

Amplify Partners and XYZ Venture Capital led the latest funding, bringing its total to $14 million. Asking for its valuation, the company declined.

In 2019, attorney Eric Baum, his brother Bryan Baum, and AI and speech-to-text transcription engineers founded Parrot. Eric, a longtime prosecutor who conducted depositions at the special victims unit of the State Attorney’s Office of Florida, saw firsthand the shortage of court reporters as demand for deposition service grows every year and wanted to streamline the deposition process by using large language models (LLMs) for the legal industry and other sectors.

“LLM improvements are the next paradigm shift, akin to the internet and mobile,” said Amplify Partners general partner Mike Dauber.

Parrot CEO Aaron O’Brien, who has worked in tech for over 15 years at Flexport, Uber, and Facebook, told that Parrot’s founding team saw an opportunity to bring much-needed technology to the legal industry, which has been overlooked and underserved.

O’Brien told that lawyers aren’t resistant to tech. Attorneys are eager to adopt new technologies, but they need trustworthy and workflow-optimized solutions.

In 2021, Parrot’s early investors introduced O’Brien to the founding team. O’Brien has helped the AI startup scale a global insurance carrier deposition provider.

Parrot AI aims to help users efficiently gather and synthesize information to achieve better and faster results using AI.

The startup plans to invest more in legal and insurance AI and develop tools to address industry challenges with the proceeds.

O’Brien said court transcription customers must call or email a court-reporting vendor and wait days for confirmation. O’Brien explained that Parrot lets users book a deposition and secure capacity with one click and send meeting-ready calendar links to all parties.

After a deposition, attorneys must order an expensive transcript, which takes more than ten days to receive. O’Brien said Parrot’s deposition review tools provide attorneys with a fully searchable, highly accurate rough draft transcript synced with video and audio. He added that Parrot’s cloud-based platform securely stores deposition transcripts, video and audio recordings, and more.

“Our highly specialized models are trained extensively on proprietary and domain-specific data,” O’Brien said. “Parrot’s approach is not another enterprise’s solution built on top of generic API—it’s a suite of highly customized models, infrastructure and domain expertise years in the making that offers unprecedented accuracy for legal professionals.”

Parrot is like “going from a Nokia to an iPhone,” according to Warner & Fitzmartine attorney Aaron Warner. According to the startup, Parrot customers—from C-suite executives focused on budget and outcomes to support staff scheduling depositions—say there’s no going back.

Parrot is used by hundreds of law firms, insurance companies, law enforcement, and corporations for depositions, witness statements, and oaths. The four-year-old company reported millions in revenue.