Case Study
Enabling Secure Enterprise Voice AI While Protecting Proprietary Models and Sensitive Data

Customer Profile
Deepgram is a leading voice AI foundation-model company trusted by enterprises and developers worldwide for speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and voice-agent applications. Its advanced models are built on a foundation of significant proprietary research, training and optimization, making them valuable intellectual property and central to the company’s market leadership.
Industry
Industry
Use Cases
Model weights, AI Model Owners
Products
Fortanix Confidential AI
Challenge
Protecting Deepgram’s Model IP
Deepgram’s models, including weights, parameters and architecture, represent years of innovation and substantial investment. Deploying frontier models into third-party environments, whether on premises, in AI Factories, or across NeoCloud providers, introduces significant business risk. Model owners must consider that:
- Model weights could be copied or extracted
- Proprietary logic could be reverse-engineered
- AI assets could be reused without authorization
Securing Highly Sensitive Voice Data Across Enterprises
Voice AI often operates on some of the most sensitive information an organization handles. Depending on the industry, this could include:
- Patient histories and clinical conversations
- Banking calls and financial details
- Customer support interactions
- Internal meetings and confidential discussions
- Government or security-related communications

Fortanix Solutions
Deepgram addresses these challenges with Fortanix Confidential AI, enabling the secure deployment of proprietary voice AI models across enterprise environments without exposing model IP or sensitive customer data. Fortanix Confidential AI combines confidential computing, attestation, and secure key management to protect both models and data while they are in use.
In-Memory Encryption
Models and voice data remain protected during execution
Cryptographic Attestation
Only verified, trusted environments can run workloads
Secure Key Release
Model weights decrypt only under approved conditions
Zero Trust for Admins
Even privileged users cannot access protected workload data
Benefits

Deepgram’s model weights remain protected during execution, helping prevent theft, replication, reverse engineering and unauthorized access
With Fortanix, Deepgram can support self-hosted, on-premises and controlled enterprise AI deployments that would have previously been too risky from an IP perspective.
With secure models and data, healthcare, finance, and government organizations can deploy voice AI with confidence and control.
By reducing security concerns around runtime exposure, organizations can launch their voice AI initiatives to production faster and with far less friction.
Fortanix uses cryptographic verification to ensure trusted execution, controlled key access, reduced exposure, and enforceable security.

“Voice contains the enterprise's most sensitive data, patient conversations, financial transactions, classified briefings. As real-time voice becomes the primary interface of the enterprise, organizations need to deploy voice AI in the environments their security, confidentiality, and regulatory requirements demand. Together with Fortanix and NVIDIA, we've made it possible to run voice AI without compromise. Your data stays protected, your models stay protected, and you still get real-time performance.”
Scott Stephenson,
CEO, Deepgram
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