LOVO, a synthetic speech platform, raises $2 million in a extension to its pre-Series A funding round which now totals $6.5 million.
LOVO is a synthetic speech platform which has applications in education, marketing, entertainment, and the creation of audio material in general. LOVO was started by a group of U.C. Berkeley AI and machine learning experts. The tool is used by over 40,000 people in 41 countries, who have created over 3 million pieces of speech content so far. As an alum of Berkeley SkyDeck accelerator, the company has working partnerships with Google, Intel, NVIDIA, AWS, and LG CNS.
The latest funding round was led by Hashed, a global crypto venture capital firm active in the blockchain gaming and NFT ecosystem, previously investing in Axie Infinity, The Sandbox and Decentraland.
Simon Kim, Hashed CEO, said:
“The vision and technical expertise behind Voiceverse is truly astounding. We strongly believe that voice is one of the missing links in a truly digital and inclusive Metaverse, enabling new ways for people to interact with each other in virtual worlds.”
The funding round also witnessed participation from PKO Investments, who are bringing on prominent angels like Yat Siu (Founder of Animoca Brands), Patrick Lee (Founder of Rotten Tomatoes), Holly Liu (Founder of Kabam), Kun Gao (Founder of Crunchyroll), Ray Chan (Founder of 9GAG), Matt Finick (Former CFO of ROBLOX & Marvel Studios), Daniel Wu (Actor of Into the Badlands & Tomb Raider), and Goodwater Capital.
LOVO plans to use the new funds to advance its research and development in artificial intelligence and synthetic speech for Web 3.0.
It comes off the success of the Voiceverse NFT collection, a set of 8,888 NFTs that each represents a unique, AI-generated voice. Each Voiceverse NFT grants access to a unique AI voice model, which can be used to produce any kind of speech content or even used in real-time on voice chat platforms like Discord.
Voiceverse NFTs launched in late January 2022 and sold out after just 10 minutes of their public sale. They showcased the strength of LOVO’s synthetic speech technology, producing all 8,888 unique voices starting from a seed of 100 real recordings. The seed voices were licensed from LOVO’s partner voice actors, including Jonny Cruz and Charlet Chung, most notable for their role in the popular game Overwatch. All partner voice actors receive a significant royalty on each sale that occurs on NFT marketplaces like OpenSea.
The model pioneered by LOVO allows voice actors to finally take a much more significant cut of their work and the profits generated from it. Previously, voice actors were generally paid flat fees for their work and did not receive any windfall if the content they produced went on to generate billions in revenue.
One of the more interesting applications of voice within the metaverse is to combine the unique NFTs with existing profile picture NFTs and exclusive avatars such as BAYC. Adding a voice to the image makes the NFT a truly complete digital avatar, powered by advances in AI technology.
Going forward, LOVO plans to partner with crypto games and Metaverse worlds so that their holders can customize their virtual identity using Voice NFTs, and mint renowned celebrity voices as new Voice NFT collections.
Tom Lee, Co-Founder of LOVO, said:
“We’ve long had the freedom to change our appearances however we want online, but not with how we sound. With Voiceverse, people can now add another layer of personalization and pseudonymity, completing their persona for the metaverse. As a company that’s spent years researching and developing applications leveraging AI Voice & Synthetic Speech, this was a no-brainer – Voiceverse is simply a natural progression in line with LOVO’s vision and tech.”
According to MarketsandMarkets, the global text-to-speech (TTS) market is projected to reach $5 billion by 2026, registering a CAGR of 14.6% during 2021-2026. The global voiceover market is currently around $10 billion, which is expected to grow at a CAGR of 12.3% over the next 5 years.
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