Artificial intelligence startup Murf AI has raised $10 Mn in its Series A funding round led by Matrix Partners India.
Existing investor Elevation Capital and angel investors– Ajay Arora from Disney Streaming and founders of Ola, Mad Street Den, Drip Capital, and Vymo also participated in the round.
Murf plans to utilize the funds to develop product innovation, accelerate research and development and expand its geographical footprint.
“Murf is reinventing a multi-billion dollar category with their AI-voiceover technology. Creating voiceovers is hard, and Murf’s unique IP makes it easy for every individual to create emotional and theatrical voices faster, better, and cheaper,” said Pranay Desai, principal at Matrix India.
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Founded in October 2020 by IIT-Kharagpur graduates Sneha Roy, Ankur Edkie, and Divyanshu Pandey, Murf offers an AI-enabled SaaS tool that generates human-like voiceovers. The startup’s tool can be used by individuals for preparing videos and presentations thus, eliminating the need for hiring a voice artist or procuring recording equipment.
Murf said that it aims to make high-quality voiceovers accessible to all content creators by creating an online voice studio. Its AI tool can mimic a slew of speaking styles such as conversational, casual, authoritative, sad, anxious, and annoyance, among others. Besides, the AI tool’s use cases include online learning, advertising, podcasting, and audiobooks.
“Synthetic media is poised to become omnipresent in the near future and voice is at the core of it. At Murf, we continue to improve our speech technology by bringing diverse abilities of talented voice actors to our customers’ fingertips through AI. This Series A investment would further bolster our commitment towards simplifying and scaling voiceovers,” said Edkie.
Murf claims its human voiceover SaaS tool has been trained for hours to mimic actual human speech. At present, the startup’s tool can create over 120 human voices across 20+ languages and is planning to bridge the diversity gap by including varied accents including African American, British, and Australian English.
Murf said that the global text-to-speech sector is likely to grow to $7.06 Bn by 2028, expanding at a 14.7% CAGR by 2028. Meanwhile, the voiceover and dubbing market is estimated to generate $8 Bn annually by 2027.
In 2021, Murf secured a $1.5 Mn in its seed funding round led by Elevation Capital. Since then, the startup claims to have grown by 22x in ARR and completed over 1 Mn voice-over projects.
The startup competes with the likes of Play. Ht, Clipchamp, and Resemble.ai, among others.