Ventures and Harbor Pacific Capital

The emergence of the Siri personal voice assistant on Apple’s iPhone has brought a rush of interest to the area of speech recognition and natural language technology, and one beneficiary of that has been Ginger Software, a developer of speech technology that is today announcing a round of $5.4 million, $5 million of which will come from from two big-name backers, Li Ka-shing’s Horizon Ventures and Harbor Pacific Capital. The funding comes less than six months after Ginger announced a round of $6.3 million. Total backing for the company now stands at close to $21 million.

Netanel Jacobsson, CEO of Ginger, tells TechCrunch that the funding being announced today is an extension of that earlier Series D round and will be used to develop more products using the company’s natural language processing platform. As part of the deal, Frank Meehan from Horizons becomes a board member. The remaining $400,000 comes from current investors, says Ginger.