Spectrum Labs raises $32M for AI-based content moderation that monitors billions of conversations daily for toxicity

Greycroft led Spectrum’s previous round of $10 million in September 2020, and the company has now raised $46 million in total.Davis, who co-founded the company with Josh Newman (the CTO), said Spectrum Labs is not disclosing valuation, but the company’s business size today speaks to how it’s been doing.Spectrum Labs today works with just over 20 big platforms — they include social networking companies Pinterest and The Meet Group, dating site Grindr, Jimmy Wales’ entertainment wiki Fandom, Riot Games, and e-learning platform Udemy — which in turn have millions of customers sending billions of messages to each other day, either in open chat rooms or in more direct, private conversations.Its technology is based around natural language and works in real time both on text-based interactions and audio interactions.Davis notes that its audio work is “read” as audio, not transcribed to text first, which gives Spectrum’s customers a significant jump on responding to the activity, and counteracting what Davis referred to as “The Wild West nature of voice,” due to how slow responses typically are for those not using Spectrum’s technology: a platform has to wait for users to flag iffy content, then the platform has to find that audio in the transcriptions, and then it can take action — a process that could take days.This is all the more important since voice-based services — with the rise not just of podcasting but services like Clubhouse and Spaces on Twitter — are growing in popularity.Whether text or audio, Spectrum scans these exchanges for toxic content covering more than 40 behavior profiles that it built initially in consultation with researchers and academics around the world and continues to hone as it ingests more data from across the web.