Kennet and Favonius invest €9m in Fluency Voice

Two European technology venture capital firms, Favonius Ventures and Kennet Venture Partners have joined forces to invest €9m in Fluency Voice Technology, a UK-based provider of speech recognition applications. Kennet will invest a total of €5.3m whilst Favonius will invest a further €3.8m. Fluency will use the new funding to fuel sales and expand product development in the area of packaged applications for vertical markets. The company is now expanding in the US and the funding will support the development of partnerships to drive the growth there.

Fluency's management team is led by Alex Green, CEO, who joined in 2002 and was previously CEO of Broadsystem, a subsidiary of News Corporation providing outsource voice and call centre services. Paul Barnes, Fluency's founder, is now sales director while David Abensour, who was also instrumental in creating the original team, is CTO. Richard Watrasiewicz is operations director, having joined when Fluency acquired Vocalis in August 2003.

netdecisions created Fluency in 2001 as a spin-out of its Cambridge-based Research and Development team. Fluency's flagship software is VoiceRunner, an application configuration environment allowing non-technical as well as technical users to create and modify speech applications. The company is focused on creating packaged applications in the financial services, travel, utilities, retail and telecoms sectors.

Fluency's customers include Barclaycard, National Express, Royal Mail, Powergen, Energis, JD Williams, Chelsea Building Society, Wells Fargo and Fujitsu.

2004-04-06

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