On September 14, 2022, machine dubbing startup, Dubdub, announced it had raised USD 1m. The company secured funding from Waveform Ventures and Accel Atoms, with Force Ventures, Forward Slash Capital, and marquee angels also participating in the round.
Dubdub’s Anubhav Singh told Slator the seed round actually closed in August 2022. Singh declined to share the valuation for Dubdub, which he co-founded in 2021 along with three other alumni from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IIT KANPUR), a research university based in Uttar Pradesh.
Singh and co-founders, Rahul Sankhwar, Rahul Garg, and Anchal Jaiswal, are located in Bangalore, India, where Dubdub is also based. Together, they form a “team of ex-founders, product managers, AI researchers […] and we have known each other for the past 10 years,” he said.
According to Singh, Dubdub was created “with the mission to democratize and personalise audio or video content” and the company’s aim is “to bridge this language gap with state-of-the-art AI in speech synthesis and generative modeling.”
India is fertile ground for such a venture, as Singh explained: “India is a country with diverse cultures, religions, and languages. Having been born and raised in India, we have always observed the need for multilingual content, be it education, marketing, or entertainment.”
80–85% Accuracy
Singh described Dubdub as having “automated every step of the process with accuracy ranging from 80–85% and the rest done through humans in the loop.” Customer onboarding is also automated to an extent. “We are closely involved in the process but we are working toward complete automation for onboarding of our clients,” he said.
According to Singh, Dubdub combines technology developed in-house with third-party APIs from “big tech such as GCP, Azure, AWS, etc. to deliver the best output.”
He also described Dubdub’s proprietary technology as including an “AI assistant that could identify errors in machine generated output and redirect users to specific areas.”
Other technologies are still in development such as “high-fidelity emotional AI voices in Indian languages [and] machine translation models specifically for dubbing for different industries.”
At present, Dubdub focuses on three core customer segments: production houses and OTT customers, enterprise customers, and marketing and creative agencies. Singh said, “Current traction is mostly coming from marketing and creative agencies but there is a strong pull from production houses or OTT.”
The company is currently in closed beta, with potential customers asked to register for a waitlist during sign-up on the website.
Slator 2021 Language Industry M&A and Funding Report
Dubdub’s website shows prices as ranging from USD 5–20 per minute. Asked to elaborate on the different pricing levels, Singh said, “We are more focused on high-quality dubbing in Indian languages [and] the pricing depends upon the overall size of the project and the type of content.”
As for what’s next, Singh told Slator that Dubdub’s “current focus is on dubbing from any language to Indian languages” and that the company’s 6–12 month goal is “to bring operational efficiency for high quality dubbing in Indian languages. Once that is achieved we will plan for global expansion.”
Dubdub is one of a number of AI startups focused on video translation. Similar companies that recently secured funding include Dubverse, which raised USD 0.8m in a seed round in June 2022, and XL8, an MT-for-entertainment startup, which raised USD 3m, also in June.
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