Professor Young has joined the firm, co-founded by another Cambridge serial entrepreneur – Hermann Hauser – in its early stage, deep tech investing team. Professor Young will help to identify and assess promising investment opportunities and advise portfolio companies as they scale and commercialise.
As an an Emeritus Professor of Information Engineering at Cambridge University, he is well suited to do so. 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.
Professor Young 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 of Engineering at Entropic Inc – acquired by Microsoft in 1999 – and founder of VocalIQ which was acquired by Apple in 2015. He went on to become a senior Member of Technical Staff in the Siri Development team in Cambridge.
Anne Glover, CEO and co-founder at Amadeus, said: “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.”
Professor Young added: “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.
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