Today we’re excited to announce our $20m in Series A financing. This takes our total funding to $30.5m, making us one of the most funded AI dubbing companies globally. 

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

This round also saw new angels Des Traynor, Co-founder of Intercom, and John Collison, Co-founder of Stripe join an impressive 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 will help Papercup with our mission of making the world’s video content watchable in any language. It will help us to double down on our research around expressive voices, expand into new languages, and scale our offering in markets we have proven our technology works well. Our aim is to shake up a $100 billion future market.

Zoe Reich, investor, Octopus Ventures commented:  "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.

Around the world, billions of hours of video content are trapped in a single language. Through our innovative machine learning platform, we help automate large parts of dubbing, making video localization accessible to content owners who are looking to expand globally with their existing catalog - be it entertainment videos on YouTube or PlutoTV to eLearning on platforms such as Skillshare or training and marketing videos distributed directly to users of tech platforms. “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.” said Jesse Shemen, Papercup’s Co-founder and CEO. 

If you would like to find out more how we can scale your video dubbing and localization, you can book a consultation here.