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Another company with roots in the Faculty of Information Technology has attracted the interest of a foreign investor and is changing ownership. Phonexia was founded in 2006 by six members of the BUT Speech / Speech@FIT research group. After two decades of successful operation and market penetration—today the company has dozens of major customers—Phonexia has attracted a major player from Southeast Asia. Its new owner is the South Korean investment fund Crescendo Equity Partners, which focuses on technology projects with growth potential. The fund invests in medium-sized companies often associated with hardware (and semiconductors in particular). However, as evidenced not only by the example of Phonexia, but also by the Belgian company iText, it does not shy away from the software sector either. The move can be seen as preparation for the company's further international expansion.

Phonexia has long ceased to be a small player, and we are not just measuring this by the number of employees (currently more than 50). It is an example of how successful a technology project from Central Europe can be when it is based on cutting-edge university research. Today, it can be described as a global provider of advanced voice solutions trusted by security and intelligence agencies and the military. In fact, the government sector accounts for more than 80% of Phonexia's customers. This is also due to the fact that the portfolio is designed specifically for the secure processing of sensitive data directly at the customer's premises. The company also offers one of the most accurate voice biometrics technologies in the world, which uses neural networks to identify a speaker in an instant. Its tools also enable cutting-edge voice analytics—speech transcription in more than 60 languages and the extraction of targeted information from audio recordings. Phonexia's products are also used by banks and call centers.

From bold faculty beginnings to a global player

Phonexia was founded in 2006 and is linked to the previous development of voice technologies and machine speech processing at the Faculty of Information Technology at Brno University of Technology, specifically within the aforementioned research group of "speech scientists." The faculty's budding scientists soon began to participate in selected international evaluations, such as those organized by the US government institution NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), and their excellent results led them to projects with government agencies such as DARPA and IARPA. The prestige gained, existing research projects with the Ministry of the Interior or the Ministry of Defense, and the publication of selected software on the faculty's website led to interest from external partners. However, the question arose of how to commercialize the research results. "At that time, we decided to give our efforts a more formal and effective form for cooperation with partners. We also needed the results of our research to be in a form that met industry standards and for the technology to be computationally executable on standard hardware," says FIT co-founder Professor Jan Černocký, summarizing the motivation for founding Phonexia in 2006. He and the other two founders, Lukáš Burget and Petr Schwarz, recall that in many ways they were pioneers in transferring technology to the private sector at the time and had to blaze new trails. The ties between the faculty and Phonexia were particularly strong in the beginning, with the company licensing and making intensive use of, for example, the phoneme recognizer developed at FIT for its early products. The staffing of key positions in the company changed over time – in addition to the three already mentioned, the co-founders included Pavel Matějka, Igor Szöke, and Tomáš Kašpárek; Černocký himself left the company's management around 2010, and the latter two took similar steps in the following years. On the contrary, Radim Kudla, who was put in charge of business development, and Michal Hrabí, who had led the company for several years, joined the team, adding new direct personnel links to FIT. Phonexia gradually expanded, and with that came the need to deal with many things beyond the technological product itself, such as sales and marketing. There were also more challenging times, such as the COVID period, when orders from the public sector were suspended. With the pandemic subsiding, the company's financial results accelerated, which can be considered fortunate timing given the current sales.

Even now, the company's cooperation with the research group of speech scientists and the Security@FIT group (in the case of the latter, for example, in the field of voice deepfakes) continues. This has resulted in more than 10 Czech and European projects, in which Phonexia acts as a commercial partner for university research, and a number of contract research projects. Phonexia is also one of the faculty's official partners.

Motivation to sell and the near future

When asked about the reasons for seeking a strategic investor, Petr Schwarz and Lukáš Burget cannot answer in a single word. "There were several reasons for the sale. We had the company for 20 years, and people's focus naturally began to change; it's a long time. We also felt the need to move the company to the next stage of development," comments Petr Schwarz, who also works as an assistant professor at the Institute of Computer Graphics and Multimedia at FIT. His colleague, associate professor Lukáš Burget, confirms these words: "With the prospect of increasing competition and large companies such as Google, we also felt that the company needed to expand, connect with a strategic partner with a portfolio of technology companies, and not rely solely on organic growth." Of course, the question arises as to whether the change in ownership structure will lead to a loosening of the company's ties to the faculty. "We emphasized continuity; we didn't want to sell the company for parts. On the contrary, we were looking for someone who would maintain ties to faculty research and possibly even strengthen them. The company has its own research group that conducts applied research, while the faculty represents the core of basic research with an overview of current global trends. We have a promise that this will be maintained," Burget summarizes the vision for the near future. After all, personnel continuity has also been maintained, symbolized, for example, by long-time team members and now executive directors Markéta Lőrinczy (CEO) and Zuzana Roznosovová (co-CEO).

When it comes to taking stock of his feelings over the past few weeks, Petr Schwarz sees it clearly. "Well, I haven't had time to catch my breath yet," he laughs. And to provide context for his entire situation, he adds: "Alongside this, I've been working for three years on a project to deploy AI technologies on emergency lines, and we're just finalizing that and preparing to continue. Lukáš Burget adds: "People ask us how it feels to start a company and now sell your 'baby'. But I don't want to talk about nostalgia; I'm looking to the future with optimism. We're staying at the faculty, working as we always have, and we believe that our cooperation with the company will continue to expand." Both are glad that the organizationally and time-consuming period of the sale has come to an end and that they will have a little more freedom for research.

This marks the end of one chapter in the life of the former faculty spin-off. We wish Phonexia every success on its future journey. And we hope that its story will be repeated by other companies that will emerge in the future from research carried out at FIT.

On Thursday, December 4, this year's AI Awards were presented at Vzlet in Prague. These are the only professional awards in the field of artificial intelligence in the Czech Republic. Professor Hynek Heřmanský, who has close ties to the Faculty of Information Technology at Brno University of Technology and Brno University of Technology in general, received one of the six awards presented this year: Specifically, for his long-term and extraordinary contribution to the development of speech recognition and machine processing, which is a key discipline in today's artificial intelligence. Without exaggeration, we can describe him as a personality who has contributed to shaping the current form of speech recognition and neural networks. Broadly speaking, his research focuses on the detection, identification, classification, and reconstruction of information from sensory signals. Heřmanský's fundamental influence on the field is confirmed by a number of top international awards, including the ISCA Medal (2013), the IEEE Award (2020), and the status of IEEE Life Fellow.

Heřmanský's personal and professional journey is in itself an incredible story of what a Central European with a passion for modern technology has been able to achieve in recent decades. And this despite historical circumstances. He was born in 1946 in Nové Město na Moravě, graduated in electrical engineering from the Brno University of Technology in 1972, and after various vicissitudes, he managed to travel abroad and study for his doctorate at Tokyo University in Japan. In the 1980s, he was already working in the United States in industrial research for companies such as Panasonic Technologies and U.S. West Advanced Technologies. In the first half of the 1990s, he became a professor at the Oregon Graduate Institute in Portland, where many Czech students (especially from Brno) came to study with him at the beginning of the millennium, for whom it was a turning point in their careers. This was also commented on by Professor Honza Černocký, who leads the "speech" research group at FIT and was also a member of the AI Awards expert jury: "Hynka's lifetime achievement award is also a recognition of the fact that at BUT we can do science at a decent level in this field, that we have talented people at the faculty, and that we have international projects and contacts. The period around 2000, when our entire Brno group gradually passed through Hynka's laboratory in Oregon, was a crucial period. We moved from local conditions to the center of world events in speech processing, which is also called artificial intelligence today." Hynek Heřmanský himself approaches the award with unfeigned modesty and perspective: "Honestly, I'm happy about it. But I have no idea how they found me. I absolutely did not expect the invitation. I receive awards abroad, but at home it's a surprise. I don't think many people outside professional circles know about me here. I don't crave fame; in fact, I would actively resist it."

In 2003, Heřmanský moved to Europe when he took up the position of research director at the prestigious IDIAP Research Institute in Martigny, Switzerland. He was also appointed titular professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology EPFL in Lausanne. At the end of 2008, he took another major step – he accepted an offer from Johns Hopkins University in the USA and also became head of the prestigious Center for Language and Speech Processing (CLSP). He headed this center for 12 long years. His team at JHU included dozens of experts and students from around the world. Since 2022, Hynek Heřmanský has been a professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins University. He continues to maintain close ties with Czechia, which is made easier by the fact that he now spends most of the year in Brno. He works as a researcher in the Brno-based Speech@FIT research group, where he helps lead projects and mentor young scientists. His scientific career has thus symbolically come full circle: after five decades abroad, he has returned to the place where he studied at university. And he continues to pass on his experience to the next generation of Czech researchers. We are grateful to him for that!

It should be added that the AI Awards aim to highlight successful stories, personalities, companies, and organizations that have significantly contributed to the development of artificial intelligence in Czechia. In addition to Hynek Heřmanský, this year's awards went to the EDIH CTU center for creating the ADAM chatbot for the audit body of the Ministry of Finance; the Department of Social Work at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University for the deployment of artificial intelligence to reduce the administrative burden on social workers; the multi-robotic systems team of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the Czech Technical University and Fly4Future for their success in the Autonomous Drone Racing League competition; the AI for Children initiative with its artificial intelligence curriculum for primary and secondary schools; and finally, the Czech technology company E2B and its solution for the safe development of AI agents. This year's AI Awards were held under the auspices of Czech President Petr Pavel. The AI Awards are organized by the Czech National AI Platform, and the main partner of the event is the innovation agency JIC.

We will return to the life story and scientific journey of Hynek Heřmanský in a longer article in the coming days.

The Faculty of Information Technology BUTis joining the traditional Brno charity event Christmas Fir Trees in Pots organized by the Veronica Foundation for the first time this year. Students and staff can purchase a small Christmas tree that won’t end up as waste after the holidays — instead, it can be planted back in the forest in spring.

The sale at FIT will take place on Tuesday, 9 December 2025, from 10:00 to 12:00 (or until 14:00 depending on interest) at the entrance to Building A.

The trees are approximately 40 cm tall seedlings of silver fir, grown in the nurseries of the Masarykův les Křtiny. The price is 169 CZK, and each tree comes with care instructions and information about the joint spring planting, which will take place on 21 March 2026 near the Křtiny Arboretum. Payment can be made in cash or via QR code.

By purchasing a tree, you support Brno-based non-profit organizations—for example, the Veronica Foundation donates part of the proceeds to the Together for Nature fund, which supports community environmental projects across Moravia. The project also includes free fir trees for single parents, disadvantaged families, and seniors. Another goal of the initiative is to help return the silver fir back to Czech forests.