Papercup Raises £8M in Funding

papercup

Papercup, a London, UK-based artificial intelligence startup has developed pioneering speech technology which translates people’s voices into other languages, secured £8m ($10.5m) in funding.

The round was led by LocalGlobe and Sands Capital Ventures, with participation from Sky, GMG Ventures, Entrepreneur First, and BDMI and existing angel investors William Tunstell-Pedoe, the founder of Evi Technologies (acquired by Amazon to create Alexa) and Zoubin Ghahramani, Former Chief Scientist and VP of AI at Uber, and now part of the Google Brain leadership team.

The company intends to use the funds to:

  • invest further into machine learning research and
  • expand its human-in-the-loop quality control function, which is used to improve and customise the quality of the AI-translated videos. 

Founded in 2017 by Jesse Shemen and Jiameng Gao, Papercup has created an AI and machine learning-based system capable of translating people’s voices and ways of expression into other languages.

The technology is already being used to translate video content at scale, helping creators, media companies, and brands expand their reach into international audiences.

As part of this investment, Papercup has also secured investment from The Future Fund – a UK Government initiative focused on investing in innovative businesses in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. This funding takes the total Papercup has raised to more than £10m, including two Innovate UK grants.

FinSMEs

10/12/2020

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