Queen’s University Belfast speech recognition technology spinout Liopa is working on a product that analyses lip movements to provide more robust analysis in noisy environments.

Liopa, a UK-based speech recognition technology spun out of Queen’s University Belfast (QUB), has closed a seed round of undisclosed size, Irish News reported today. Venture capital fund Fund Twenty8 EIS provided the capital along with unnamed angel investors. The round was arranged through equity crowdfunding platform SyndicateRoom and Liopa reportedly raised two-and-a-half times of its original target within four weeks. Founded in 2015, Liopa has devised a machine learning-powered technology called LipReed that enhances conventional audio recognition by tracking a user’s lip movements as they speak into a camera. By focusing on visual gestures, Liopa’s system could provide greater accuracy in noisy environments while also working as a facial recognition tool to thwart attempts to substitute a person’s presence with a decoy. The seed capital will go toward the expansion of Liopa’s engineering capacity, helping the company accelerate its product development plans and protecting its intellectual property base. Liopa raised $1m in an earlier seed round in April 2018 that was co-led by QUB’s commercialisation unit, Qubis, and EU and Northern Irish executive-backed seed fund manager Techstart NI. The 2018 round included AI Seed as well as another EU and Northern Irish executive-backed vehicle, Co-Fund NI. Liopa also secured an undisclosed amount of pre-seed funding from unnamed backers the previous year. The spinout’s chief scientist is Darryl Stewart, a senior lecturer in QUB’s School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science whose work has focused on fusing audio-visual data streams.

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