Artificial Intelligence startup Papercup secured $10.5 million funding

Papercup, a London based AI startup has now secured $10.5 million in the funding round, reports TechCrunch.

Papercup is founded by Jesse Shemen and Jiameng Gao in the year 2017. It has developed an Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning based system capable of translating people's voices and ways of expression into other languages.

Papercup co-founder and CEO Shemen, said, "Most of the world’s video and audio content is shackled to a single language. That includes billions of hours of videos on YouTube, millions of podcast episodes, tens of thousands of classes on Skillshare and Coursera, and thousands of hours of content on Netflix. Almost every content owner is scrambling to go international, but there is yet no simple and cost-effective way to translate content beyond subtitling. We started off by making our voices as human-like and natural sounding as possible, where we’ve made quite a significant 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".

The round was backed by Sands Capital Ventures and LocalGlobe with participation from GMG Ventures, Sky, BDMI, and Entrepreneur First.

The company as of now has plans to use the new funds to invest further into machine learning research and expand its human in the loop quality control function, which is merely used to improve and customize the quality of the AI translated videos.