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September 21, 2022

Synthetic Speech Startup Murf AI Raises $10M in Series A

Sept. 21, 2022 — Murf AI today announced a $10M Series A funding round led by Matrix Partners India with participation from existing investor Elevation Capital as well as angel investors. Murf plans to use these funds to drive further product innovation, accelerate R&D, and scale its presence in focused geographies.

Founded in October 2020 by IIT-Kharagpur class mates Sneha Roy, Ankur Edkie and Divyanshu Pandey; Murf provides an AI-enabled SaaS tool that allows users to generate “human-like” voice overs for videos and presentations—without the need for complex recording equipment or hiring a voice artist.

“Synthetic media is poised to become omnipresent in the near future and voice is at the core of it,” said Murf CEO Ankur Edkie. “At Murf we continue to make advances in our speech technology to bring the diverse abilities of talented voice actors at our customers’ fingertips through AI. This Series A investment would further bolster our commitment towards simplifying and scaling voiceovers.”

In May of 2021, the company raised a $1.5M Seed funding round which helped them recruit talent and invest in both product innovation and user acquisition. Since then Murf has grown 22x in ARR and synthesized over one million voice over projects.

According to market reports, the global text to speech market is expected to reach $7.06B by 2028, growing at a 14.7% CAGR. In addition, the voiceover and the dubbing market is predicted to generate a total of $8B annually by 2027. Tapping into this unparalleled opportunity, Murf aims to make high-quality voice overs accessible to all by placing a simple yet powerful online voice studio in the hands of every content creator. From conversational to aspirational, casual to authoritative, excited to sad, cheerful to angry, Murf’s AI voices can simulate a variety of speaking styles and tones. The firm has a high-quality AI voice for every use case, including eLearning, advertising, podcasting, L&D and audiobooks.

While text to speech has been around for years, limitations in quality restricted the usage of the technology to primarily IVR and chat bots. Recent advances in AI and deep learning have however made it possible to build synthetic voices that mimic the natural prosody and pronunciation of human speech. Murf’s AI engine has been trained on hours of actual human speech to produce high-fidelity synthetic AI voices that mimic the nuances and subtleties, including the likeness, style and uniqueness of the human voice.  The 120-plus human-parity AI voices offered by Murf Studio across over 20 languages are rich with emotion and intonation. The startup is also working towards bridging the diversity gap that exists in traditional text to speech platforms by ensuring the inclusion of voices across varied accents like African American, British, and Australian English.

Akin to the human brain, Murf’s AI-powered TTS can track and learn from a vast amount of contextual information to return a relevant response. Serving as an all-in-one voice solution, its simple-to-use AI voice generator enables users to add images, videos, and background music and sync the voiceover with the visuals and music. The platform also offers key features for smart pronunciations using IPA, voice customizations that enable users to change pitch, pause, emphasis, and speed, and ability to clone a voice.

About Murf AI

Murf AI helps businesses simplify the process of creating natural-sounding voiceovers using AI. The firm’s AI-powered Saas tool enables users to create lifelike voices for their content in a matter of minutes. From L&D, educators, authors, and podcasters to animators, product developers, YouTubers, freelancers, and corporate coaches, the platform has a voice for every creator across all industries. Murf’s curated voice library of over 120 realistic sounding AI voices in over 20 languages is ideal for those on a tight budget who want to create voiceovers at scale. Murf’s geographic footprint spans worldwide with 80 percent of its customers coming in from the US, Canada and EU regions.


Source: Murf AI

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