UK-based translation software developer Papercup has secured £8m ($10.6m) from investors including media companies Sky, Guardian Media Group and Bertelsmann, TechCrunch reported yesterday.
The round was co-led by investment adviser Sands Capital Ventures and venture capital firm LocalGlobe and also featured Entrepreneur First, with Guardian and Bertelsmann taking part through their GMG Ventures and BDMI vehicles.
Papercup has developed technology that uses machine learning to translate digital video content into other languages, generating voices that sound like the original speaker. It emerged out of Entrepreneur First’s company builder scheme.
Jesse Shemen, co-founder and CEO of Papercup, told TechCrunch: “We started off by making our voices as human-like and natural sounding as possible, where we have made quite a sigrobnificant leap in terms of quality by honing our technology to the task, and today we have one of the best Spanish speech synthesis systems in production.
“We’re now focusing on better retainment and transfer of the original emotion and expressiveness in the original speaker across languages, and meanwhile figuring out what it is exactly that makes for quality dubbing.”