Zentian was formed in early 2002 to develop speech recognition technology. The company has raised roughly $300,000 to date from friends, family, and local Cambridge UK angels, along with greater than 10 man-years of work in exchange for shares. First round funding in the range of $2M to $5M will be sought in 1H’07. The company has five employees.

Zentian has developed silicon IP that significantly reduces the cost of implementing high quality speech recognition in toys and consumer electronics. Its accelerator is compatible with software from all of the tier one speech recognition vendors. The company has two issued patents and more on the way.

Sensory is the currently the dominant speech recognition competitor. Zentian’s technology offloads key parts of the speech recognition task from software to dedicated silicon accelerator, resulting in system cost reduction. It also enables a far more extensive vocabulary.

Zentian will go to market as an IC company. FPGA-based development boards are available now and first samples are anticipated in Q4’07. The company is initially targeting the toy market and a major toy OEM is currently evaluating the technology.

Mark Catchpole, founder & CEO (Previously a chip designer at Phoenix VLSI, Sony, NEC, ARC Cores, Pixelfusion and Radiant Networks. Prior to Zentian, he ran his own consulting business for three years.)

Guy Larri, EVP of Business Development (previously a technical lead, project manager and product manager at ARM)

Paul Harding, CFO (26 years of finance and accounting experience including a 3i controller)