Scott Stephenson is cofounder and CEO  of Deepgram. He earned a PhD in particle physics at the University of Michigan with a focus on Machine Learning. He then spent time building a system designed to detect dark matter two miles underground. That experience inadvertently introduced Scott and a colleague to the limitations of speech recognition systems which to their surprise were not using the same deep learning architecture with hardware acceleration they had built to detect dark matter activity. It ultimately led to founding Deepgram in 2015 as a new model for automated speech recognition. The company added 12 million in funding in March of 2020.