Lucida AI, a speech-to-speech AI platform for global communication, has raised £5.3 million in a seed round led by Velocity Capital, with participation from Next Tier Ventures, Look AI Ventures, Bogazici Ventures, Yapı Kredi Frwrd Ventures and Ünlü & Co. The round follows approx. £1 million in pre-seed investment led by Neo Asset Management, bringing total funding to £8.3 million. New capital will be used to expand into new languages and geographies, further develop Lucida AI's proprietary speech-to-speech infrastructure, scale its enterprise offering globally, and accelerate product development.
Spoken fluency and confidence increasingly shape how clearly someone is understood as people and organisations communicate across more languages and cultures. Lucida AI addresses this by giving individuals and business teams continuous, on-demand speaking practice that fits into the flow of their day. Through the platform, users speak directly with AI in real time, without typing, complex interfaces, or scripted exercises, with the system acting as a communication coach that helps users practise through natural dialogue. Powered by its proprietary Speech Language Model, Lucida AI enables free-flowing conversations that adapt to each speaker's level in real time, providing instant feedback on fluency, pronunciation and clarity, and simulating real-world scenarios ranging from everyday chats such as ordering coffee to high-stakes business meetings, presentations and client calls. The platform is available as a mobile app for individual users, alongside secure deployment options for enterprise clients, including on-premises hosting and end-to-end encryption.
In the 15 months since launch, Lucida AI has scaled to over 3 million users globally and generated more than 2.2 billion minutes of spoken interaction across Europe, the United States and emerging markets.
AI is becoming a global race, and meaningful innovation is no longer tied to a single geography. With this round, we've partnered with investors who share our long-term vision. Our focus is clear: building a scalable, speech-native AI platform that powers global communication.
Lucida AI possesses the characteristics of the types of businesses that the Velocity EIS Technology Fund looks to invest in: a strong management team; capital efficiency; data-driven; international application; significant growth in a growing market, with a broad and mixed customer base. We are delighted to join the team on their journey.
We invested in Lucida because of the team's speed and a vision we found genuinely ambitious: making high-quality spoken-language practice accessible. The company aims to disrupt the LLM wrappers currently available, as none can provide the same level of reliability. Lucida is building a speech-native learning platform with real-time conversation and a phonetic engine that provides more accurate pronunciation feedback than generic AI tutors. With a seven-digit ARR, it's on a clear path to becoming a category-defining company in AI-powered communication.
We believe AI's next frontier is seamless human communication. Lucida AI is uniquely positioned to make that vision a reality on a global scale.
