Clearspeed announced a partnership this month with Carahsoft Technology Corp., which provides IT hardware, software and consulting services to federal, state and local governments. Carahsoft will be Clearspeed’s main public sector distributor under the agreement.
Along with its reseller partners, Carahsoft has established partnerships with entities like the U.S. Department of Defense, national contract purchasing cooperative The Interlocal Purchasing Program and ValuePoint, the cooperative procurement and purchasing program operated by the National Association of State Procurement Officials.
“For us, it was the ability to partner with a great organization that has tremendous scale and access and opportunity to get us to places faster (that) we couldn’t get, and the ability to move by, with and through their ecosystem,” said Alex Martin, co-founder and CEO of Clearspeed.
“And then for them, I’m sure it was an attraction to our unique value proposition, the markets that we serve and their ability to bring their customers something new,” he added.
Human and AI Voice Detection
Clearspeed analyzes speech and imperceptible changes in voice characteristics using its digital signal processing technology to determine the risk profile of someone's voice, enabling businesses like banks and insurance companies to prevent potential fraud.
Clearspeed’s voice analysis technology has helped insurance companies reduce their time to handle claims by 50% while reducing the vetting process for government clients by some 95%, according to the company.
In addition to detecting human voice irregularities, the company is taking on the increasing threat of artificial intelligence-based voice replication and other synthetic voice tools.
Martin argued that a lot of bad actors using synthetic voice tools are still relatively low tech but that they will soon start to benefit from the technology more advanced users like criminal organizations and even state-sponsored actors.
“And when the proliferation of those becomes more open and less expensive or more usable, you’re going to have to hope that the deterrent has come up far enough to meet that demand similar,” he said. “And that’s where I think there’s going to be a gap.”
Martin, a 20-year U.S. Marine Corps veteran and former intelligence officer, co-founded Clearspeed in 2016 in an effort to make it easier to build trust quickly to prevent both insider military attacks and potential fraud and other white-collar crime.
The company’s first contract was secured with the Department of Defense’s Special Operations Command to vet hundreds of commando recruits in Afghanistan and Clearspeed’s technology showcased an accuracy rate of more than 97%, according to the company.
“The most ... basic human principle of any transaction or exchange is trust,” Martin said. “You exchange it, either lose it or you have it, it’s hard to get if you lose it and it’s hard to establish.”
National and International Expansions
In the last two years, Clearspeed has expanded internationally and begun working with major insurance carriers in the United Kingdom as well as multiple carriers in the U.S. and has established partnerships with companies like Deloitte and Allianz.
The U.K. market was “catalytic” for Clearspeed, according to Martin, because it enabled the company to begin working with insurance carriers for the first time before turning to the same market in the U.S.
“We kind of used the U.K. as the forging point for then looking here into the U.S. and saying, ‘okay we’ve done it there, now we want to come into this market, this market’s a lot more complicated, more complex,’” Martin said.
The current version of Clearspeed’s technology can process speech in more than 60 languages and is used in 37 countries. The company is also growing rapidly, with Martin expecting Clearspeed’s year-over-year growth to double this year.
The company is also actively raising capital to add additional fuel to its growth, following its previous $27 million Series C funding round in 2022.
“I think amidst everything that’s happening right now, not just here in this country but globally, the one steady thing we can count on, and that we do count on here at Clearspeed, is the ability to produce an unbiased, reliable datapoint that helps clear people and alert with no harm as an outcome,” Martin said.
“You can either build walls or let people in freely, in transactions or people,” he added. “And so we kind of offer this hybrid way that I think is really exciting.”
Clearspeed
FOUNDED: 2016
CEO: Alex Martin
HEADQUARTERS: San Diego
BUSINESS: Voice analytics technology for risk assessment
EMPLOYEES: 120
WEBSITE: clearspeed.com
CONTACT: info@clearspeed.com
NOTABLE: Clearspeed was named the best counter-fraud insurance technology company at the 2024 Global InsurTech Awards
