Synthetic Speech Startup Murf AI Raises $10M
Synthetic speech startup Murf AI has raised $10 million in a Series A funding round led by Matrix Partners India. Murf offers its clients more than 120 AI-generated voices in 20 languages and can produce new ones or create voice clones from audio data for voiceovers, text-to-speech programs, and other projects.
Murf Speech
Murf’s founders created Murf two years ago this October while still students at IIT-Kharagpur in India. The startup picked up $1.5 million in an Elevation Capital-led seed funding round and now claims to have produced more than a million voiceover projects for a mushrooming clientele. The many voices available from Murf have been used for a wide range of tasks, including advertising, educational materials, podcasts, and audiobook performances. The new funding round brought back Elevation Capital and added a handful of angel investors. Murf said it will use the new funds to scale its business to new locations and further enhance its technology, with an eye toward incorporating accents and ways of speaking that are less commonly found among synthetic speech platforms.
“Synthetic media is poised to become omnipresent in the near future and voice is at the core of it,” Murf CEO Ankur Edkie said. “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.”
The skyrocketing demand for all kinds of synthetic media means startups like Murf draw plenty of interest from investors as they race to fund better, faster, and more flexible voice models. Companies are eager to boast of improvements and new features, as exemplified recently by Nvidia’s upgraded Riva synthetic speech engine, D-ID’s new platform, and Neosapience rolling out an AI-powered tool allowing users to write out the emotion they want virtual actors to use when speaking.
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