On May 6, 2025, open source technology consulting firm Quansight announced that it had acquired Cobalt Speech and Language, a provider of automatic speech recognition (ASR), transcription, natural language understanding, and other voice technologies in multiple languages. The deal closed April 10, 2025. 

According to Quansight CEO Travis Oliphant, the purchase was for cash, earn-out, and equity in Quansight portfolio companies. 

“Quansight builds AI systems and has key developers who know how to build the tools behind AI (PyTorch, JAX, Tensorflow, and NumPy),” Oliphant told Slator. “Cobalt builds language systems that use these tools.”

Oliphant said that Quansight decided to acquire Cobalt, rather than build its own speech technologies in-house, based on the strength of Cobalt’s team, which could help maintain a certain speed of development. Of course, he acknowledged that the prospect of acquiring Cobalt’s customers was also attractive.

Massachusetts-based Cobalt was founded in 2014 by CEO Jeff Adams, known as the “father of Alexa” for his work on Amazon Echo. A press release on the acquisition quoted Adams as saying that Cobalt has “always focused on delivering highly customized speech and language tools that work in the real world, not just in the lab.”

Oliphant told Slator that Cobalt’s approximately 15 employees, including Adams, will join Quansight’s team of 80.

Cobalt currently offers several voice-enabled technologies, including Cobalt Transcribe for speech recognition and transcription. Its end-to-end speech recognition engines are powered by deep neural networks (DNNs), and clients can choose from two different DNN models based on their needs.

Hybrid models use separately tunable acoustic models, lexicons, and language models for maximum flexibility and customization for various use cases.

End-to-end models, meanwhile, directly convert sounds to words within the same DNN. This version works for general use and tends to produce more accurate transcriptions (based on word error rates) than the hybrid models.

Speech recognition is available in English, Spanish, French, German, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, Korean, Japanese, Swahili, and Cambodian, though Cobalt is “always looking for partners to develop, sell, and/or market speech technology in other languages,” according to Cobalt Transcribe FAQs.

Other services include Cobalt Speech Intelligence, which analyzes audio to glean demographic information about speakers, such as age, gender, and regional accent, plus emotion.

Investments and Intersections

As a consulting firm, Quansight specializes in solving data-related problems with open-source software and services, including AI, data and machine learning engineering, RAG, and large language models (LLMs), among others. 

Quansight, founded in 2018, has previously invested in pre-seed rounds for two other companies: Savimbo, a certifier of fair-trade carbon, biodiversity, and water credits; and Mod Tech Labs, an AI platform for 3D content creation. 

Quansight Initiate, an early-stage VC firm also headed by Oliphant, has invested in five open source tech startups since its 2019 founding.

“Quansight recently completed a restructuring of subsidiary companies,” Oliphant explained to Slator. “Going forward, M&A activities will focus on OpenTeams (for AI growth), OS BIG, Inc. dba OpenTeams Incubator (investment and M&A), Cobalt Speech and Language (speech and language technology and services), and Quansight, PBC to continue with the community-driven open-source aspect of its business.”

“All of our companies now have either existing or prospective intersections with the language industry,” he added.