A British artificial intelligence startup that helped Sky News and YouTube stars translate their video content into foreign languages has secured £8m in funding to expand its speech-dubbing venture.
Papercup, which was founded three years ago, attracted early investors including William Tunstell-Pedoe, whose business was acquired by Amazon to help develop Alexa, and Uber’s former artificial intelligence chief Zoubin Ghahramani. Now it is targeting the millions of hours of content companies such as Netflix need to translate.
“Most of the world’s videos – billions of hours of content – are shackled to a single language,” said Jesse Shemen, the co-founder and chief executive of Papercup. “And that is for a simple reason: quality dubbing is prohibitively expensive and time consuming, so current solutions only work for a select group of deep-pocketed content owners.
“The technology we created will level the playing field, allowing all forms of video and audio to be consumed in any language, therefore vastly multiplying the potential reach for all content creators.”
The company, which has worked with YouTubers including Yoga with Adriene as well as the US pay-TV company Discovery, says its automated translation technology results in synthetic voice dubbing that is “indistinguishable from human speech”. Sky News used the technology to translate its English broadcast to Spanish to create a new news service.
The latest round of funding comes from backers that include venture capital funds LocalGlobe, Sands Capital Ventures and Entrepreneur First. Other investors include Sky, GMG Ventures, which is part of Guardian Media Group – the publisher of the Guardian, and The Future Fund, a UK government initiative focused on investing in innovative businesses amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Papercup has identified a huge potential market within the global media industry, giving a wide variety of creators access to the sort of capabilities that have previously been the preserve of only the biggest conglomerates,” said Mish Mashkautsan, a partner at LocalGlobe.
The funding round takes the total Papercup fundraising to more than £10m.
