Creates AI voices for Hollywood. Ukrainian startup raised $1 million in investments for scaling and development

December 7, 12:16 Share:

Ukrainian startup raised new funds (Photo: Respacer)

Respeecher, a Ukrainian startup that creates voices for Hollywood and AAA games thanks to artificial intelligence, announced that it has raised investments in the amount of one million dollars..

The startup became famous for reproducing the voices of Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker for the Star Wars series, and also, in 2023, the voices of Victor Vector for Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty. The actor who voiced the game's hero died in 2021. Together with CD Project, the startup asked the actor's family for permission to reproduce his voice to give fans a chance to hear the hero's already familiar voice again.. Respeecher has announced that it will also be reprising the voice of Edith Piaf for the Warner Music biopic.

“ This investment will help us continue to transform our service business into a platform with a stronger ethical component, which is extremely important in our industry. We have expanded ( and expanding) the team and plan to strengthen several components of the company at once: technological uniqueness, our voice marketplace, communication products, including assistance to patients with voice impairments. At the moment, some of the most interesting updates we have are work on real-time voice reproduction, the ability to change speech accents for different types of communication and localization. We also continue to do projects that only Respeecher in the world can do — reproducing voices in a quality that Hollywood respects, gradually becoming an increasingly significant and reliable partner for both original content giants and creators with very limited budgets,” said Alexander Serdyuk, co-founder and CEO of Respeecher.

Thanks to artificial intelligence, a startup allows one person to communicate in the voice of another. The main uniqueness of Respeecher is its high-quality speech-to-speech technology, which allows you to convey the entire emotional range of the speaker or voice actor, which is very important in cinematography. This technology also allows you to do the so-called cross-lingual translation — speak different languages in your own voice, even if you do not speak this language, as in the video with Bear Grills, where he speaks in Ukrainian.

Despite the B2b direction, the startup also has a SaaS solution — a marketplace of voices. It helps democratize technology, making it more accessible to smaller content creators.

« Investing in AI companies is an obvious solution. This is an investment in the creative industry. But creativity is a challenge. And AI-powered voice technology is one of many ways to solve this problem and scale your business. I liked that Respeecher knows how to do this with an ethical approach and Hollywood quality,” emphasized Gary Vaynerchuk, investor and entrepreneur.

In the previous round, the startup attracted three million investments from Techstars, Comcast, ffVC, Technexus, Acrobator, ICU and today the total investment amount is $4M.

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The company's main office is in Kyiv, and the team consists of 50 people, which Respeecher plans to expand in the near future.

The company is also implementing a project to popularize the Crimean Tatar language and the Share UA Voices initiative, which allowed world stars to support Ukrainians in the Ukrainian language.

Based on press release materials.