15 December 2023 – Cambridge, UK – Amadeus Capital Partners, the global technology investor, is delighted to welcome Professor Steve Young as a Venture Partner in its early stage, deep tech investing team. Steve will support the team in identifying and assessing promising investment opportunities and advise portfolio companies as they scale and commercialise.

Steve Young CBE, FRS, FREng is Emeritus Professor of Information Engineering at Cambridge University. His main research interests are in artificial intelligence and machine learning, especially the application of speech and language processing in conversational agents. He was a major contributor to the early development of large vocabulary speech recognition and pioneered the use of statistical modelling in spoken dialogue management.

Steve was Head of the School of Technology from 2001 through to 2004 and Senior Pro-Vice Chancellor from 2009 to 2015. He was a founder and VP Engineering at Entropic Inc acquired by Microsoft in 1999 and founder of VocalIQ Ltd acquired by Apple in 2015. He was then a Senior Member of Technical Staff in the Siri Development team in Cambridge.

Steve is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the IET and the IEEE. He holds an IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award, the ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement, a European Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award, the IEEE Gauss Education Award and the IEEE James L Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award. He was awarded a CBE for services to software engineering in 2022.

Anne Glover, CEO and Co-Founder, Amadeus Capital Partners, commented: “We’re thrilled to welcome Steve to our deep tech team at Amadeus. He is a true visionary in AI and speech recognition and his practical support, drawn from building several successful startups, will be invaluable to the companies we back.”

Prof. Steve Young said: “It has been my pleasure to work alongside Amadeus over many years in Cambridge, particularly during their investment in VocalIQ, and their backing of the PolyAI team, whose conversational AI is transforming customer services and was spun out of our lab at Cambridge. I’m looking forward to introducing more entrepreneurs to Amadeus and helping them build global businesses with staying power.”