Video Translation Company Papercup Raises $20 Million - Pulse 2.0 - Translation

• Papercup, an AI dubbing and video translation company, announced recently that it raised $20 million in Series A funding. These are the details.

Papercup, an AI dubbing and video translation company, announced recently that it raised $20 million in Series A funding. With this round of funding, the company has now raised a total of $30.5 million.

This oversubscribed round was led by Octopus Ventures and the company had follow-on participation from Local Globe, Sands Capital, Sky and Guardian Media Ventures, Entrepreneur First, and, BDMI.

This funding round also saw new angels Des Traynor, Co-founder of Intercom, and John Collison, Co-founder of Stripe join the roster of existing investors including William Tunstall-Pedoe, founder of Evi (now Amazon’s Alexa), and Zoubin Ghahramani, Senior Research Director at Google Brain, and former Chief Scientist at Uber.

This funding round will enable Papercup with the mission of making the world’s video content watchable in any language. And the funding will help the company double down on research around expressive voices, expand into new languages, and scale our offering in markets we have proven our technology works well.

KEY QUOTES:

“Spotify has 3.2 million podcasts. Youtube 500 hours of video uploaded every minute. Discovery, 100,000 hours of documentaries. CNN 4 million video assets. The volume of video and audio produced for consumption is rising exponentially, yet, only 1% is currently dubbed into multiple languages. Papercup’s use of AI to provide affordable, high quality dubbing can unlock that content for audiences around the world and in, doing so, drive a 100 fold expansion in the video and audio translation market with Papercup at the forefront.”

— Zoe Reich, investor, Octopus Ventures

“People retain up to 70% more information when watching videos dubbed in their native language. With truly emotive cross-lingual AI dubbing, we can tackle all forms of content, making video and audio more accessible and enjoyable for everyone. This funding will allow us to double down on our promising research and break into new content categories.”

— Jesse Shemen, Papercup’s Co-founder and CEO

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