Phonexia becomes part of the portfolio of investment fund Crescendo Equity Partners

The technology company Phonexia, which was founded in 2006 as a spin-off of the Faculty of Information Technology at Brno University of Technology, is changing owners. After twenty years of building an international position in the field of voice analytics and biometrics, it is becoming part of the portfolio of the South Korean investment fund Crescendo Equity Partners.

Phonexia is an example of how successful a technology project from Central Europe can be when it is based on cutting-edge university research. Today, it can be described as a global provider of advanced voice solutions trusted by security and intelligence agencies and the military.

Phonexia was founded in 2006 and is linked to the previous development of voice technologies and machine speech processing at FIT, specifically within the BUT Speech research group. "At that time, we decided to give our efforts a more formal and effective form for cooperation with partners. We also needed the results of our research to be in the form required by industry standards and the technology to be computationally executable on standard hardware," says co-founder Professor Jan Černocký, summarizing the motivation for founding Phonexia. The ties between the faculty and Phonexia were particularly strong in the beginning, with the company licensing and making intensive use of, for example, the phoneme recognizer developed at FIT for its early products. Cooperation with faculty research continues today. Of course, the question arises as to whether this will continue after the change in ownership structure. "We emphasized continuity; we didn't want to sell the company for parts. On the contrary, we were looking for someone who would maintain ties with faculty research and possibly even strengthen them," says one of the company's founders, Doc. Lukáš Burget, summarizing the vision for the near future.

One chapter in the life of the former faculty spin-off is coming to a close. We wish Phonexia every success in its future endeavors. And we hope that its story will be repeated by other companies that will emerge in the future from research conducted at FIT.

For more information about the company's history and the circumstances of its sale, see our press release.