LIFTTand the Venture Capital fund set up by the European Commission (EC) bet on artificial intelligence used in the professional dubbing sector, a 10-billion-dollar market.
The evergreen Venture Capital Holding LIFTT—as lead Investor—and the European Innovation Council Fund (EIC Fund) are investing 1 million euros in Voiseed, the Italian start-up that aims at becoming the game-changer in the dubbing industry using AI.
Voiseed’s technology can reproduce emotions and perfectly mimic the intonation and prosody of human speech, with any voice and in multiple languages, revolutionising the dubbing industry: a market worth over 10 billion dollars, currently characterised by long processing times, high production costs and significant operational complexity.
Voiseed is redefining the traditional approach to dubbing, which involves recording multilingual expressive content in studios and requires the allocation of many resources around the world. As result, many video games, TV series, documentaries and adverts are today only translated and subtitled and not dubbed, preventing many users from enjoying content in their own language.
Guido Panizza, Head of Project Management at LIFTT, commented. “The Voiseed project is perfectly in line with LIFTT’s investment strategy. A unique and disruptive innovation in the Generative AI sector, a constantly growing industry which we have been focusing on for quite a while now. This technology, when adopted in the voice sector, will allow us to listen to more and more content in more and more languages. Thanks to our input, the extension of the platform to reach 16 languages will be accelerated to make Voiseed the market leader”.
Hermann Hauser, EIC Fund Board member, said: “The EIC Fund aims at backing European innovators in scaling their journey and Voiseed is a great example of how the European Union is helping top innovators. The EIC Fund’s ambitious commitment, alongside other investors, is an important step to boost their development.”
Andrea Ballista, CEO at Voiseed said: “With this funding, we can speed up the advancement of our proprietary technology and expand the language offerings for our “Voice as a Service” platform, which uses a generative AI approach for emotional dubbing. This will allow us to enhance unique features such as the ability to effortlessly produce international versions while respecting the original casting approach and expressiveness.”
Lorenzo Tarantino, Luca Dell’Orto, Andrea Ballista
The Milan-based start-up provides a cloud based solution primarily targeting the entertainment industry. “Voicing the Unvoiced” encompasses the audacious aim of giving a voice to unvoiced content using a solution that enables publishers, developers, and audio-visual studios to broaden their offerings
The patented technology is based on an AI universal model and a proprietary emotional data-set, which allow customers to create all voice types and control any expressive style in most languages.
Voiseed’s innovation has already an important recognition to its credit: in 2021, it’s technology was awarded in the context of the European Innovation Council (EIC) Accelerator, among more than 4,000 start-ups and SMEs from various sectors.
With this investment, LIFTT, the “Sustainable Venture Capital” sought by Francesco Profumo, Chairman of Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo and led by the scientist-entrepreneur Stefano Buono, raises the number of start-ups in the portfolio to 32, covering all market sectors, positioning itself as one of the most active agents in Italy. Since 2019, LIFTT has analysed over 2000 projects with a selectivity rate of 2%, with a strong focus on deep tech and industrial projects.
