Papercup raised a US $20 million (€18.6 million) Series A funding round on June 9th, 2022. The UK artificial intelligence startup has set an ambitious objective of infusing human emotion into AI dubbing services.
The business plans to make global video content watchable in any language through expressive and lifelike synthetic voices and AI dubbing.
Local Globe, Sands Capital, Sky and Guardian Media Ventures, Entrepreneur First, BDMI, and several angel investors, including Des Traynor, co-founder of Intercom, and John Collison, co-founder of Stripe, are among the investors.
William Tunstall-Pedoe, founder of Evi (now Amazon’s Alexa), Zoubin Ghahramani, Senior Research Director at Google Brain, and former Chief Scientist at Uber are among the existing angel investors.
What the founder has to say:
Jesse Shemen, CEO of Papercup:
“When people see videos dubbed in their native tongue, they retain up to 70% more information.” We can tackle all types of content with truly expressive cross-lingual AI dubbing, making video and audio more accessible and pleasant for everyone. “With this support, we will be able to expand on our promising research and enter new content areas.”
What the investors have to say:
Zoe Reich, investor, Octopus Ventures:
“There are 3.2 million podcasts on Spotify. Every minute, 500 hours of video are posted to YouTube. There are 100,000 hours of documentaries on Discovery. CNN has a total of four million video assets. Even while the amount of video and audio generated for consumption rapidly increases, just 1% of it is currently dubbed into several languages. Papercup’s use of AI to produce economical, high-quality dubbing can unleash that content for audiences worldwide, resulting in a 100-fold increase in the video and audio translation market, with Papercup at the vanguard.”
Chris Eng, Principal, Sands Capital:
“Papercup’s solutions can have a resounding influence in a world that has progressively embraced Internet video over the previous two years, expanding the reach and liberating millions of hours of video material.” Papercup has the potential to set the bar for high-quality video localization and to illustrate the enormous value AI can provide to online and digital videos.”
About the company:
Papercup is an AI and machine learning-based system that translates people’s voices and styles of expression into other languages. It was founded in 2017. Customers upload movies, select a target language, and then receive a translated version with a synthetic narration that sounds identical to human voices.
Sky News, Discovery, and Business Insider have all employed the technology, which was also used to translate 30 seasons of Bob Ross’ renowned show The Joy of Painting. Over the last 12 months, Papercup has translated videos for over 300 million individuals.
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 Series A funding round on June 9th, 2022. The UK artificial intelligence startup has set an ambitious objective of infusing human emotion into AI dubbing services.){kind=link}