Deepgram plants APAC headquarters in Singapore on EDBI backing

Voice is quietly becoming one of the more crowded corners of enterprise AI, and Singapore has just landed a bigger stake in it. Deepgram, the US startup that runs real-time speech infrastructure for developers and call centres, is setting up its Asia-Pacific headquarters here — a decision backed by an EDBI investment that plugs the city-state straight into a company worth more than a billion dollars.

The move follows an extension of Deepgram's US$130 million Series C round, into which EDBI — the investment arm of SG Growth Capital, set up by the Economic Development Board and Enterprise Singapore — has put money. Alongside the Singapore base, the firm has hired former Salesforce executive Sriram Ved as vice-president and general manager for Asia-Pacific. Deepgram says it already serves customers in more than 20 markets across the region and saw API requests grow 96 per cent year on year.

The choice of Singapore over other Asian hubs is part of a familiar pattern for US AI infrastructure companies. As talk shifts from building models to deploying them reliably at scale, firms need a base close to the enterprises buying their services and close to the latency-sensitive workloads they run. Deepgram says the Singapore office will bring regional leadership, customer support and commercial operations closer to its users, while expanding Asian-language support and a low-latency inference footprint in the region.

For Singapore, the win is as much about signalling as it is about the jobs. Landing a unicorn-scale AI company's regional nerve centre strengthens the argument that the city can host the operational side of AI, not just consume it. It also extends the string of EDBI-backed foreign AI firms choosing Singapore, reinforcing the investment agency's strategy of using patient capital to anchor high-growth technology companies here.

Why it matters for Singapore: When a company of Deepgram's scale picks Singapore for its APAC hub, it is a vote for the city as a serious operating base for applied AI — not an R&D outpost, but the place where commercial teams, partnerships and customer support actually run. Combined with EDBI's stake, it signals that Singapore is willing to put government-linked capital behind exactly the kind of infrastructure-layer AI firms the region needs, betting that voice will be one of the next big enterprise interfaces.