Murf AI, a synthetic speech technology start-up that is transforming the way voiceovers are created, announced a $10 million Series A funding round led by Matrix Partners India with participation from existing investor Elevation Capital, as well as prominent angel investors such as Ajay Arora, SVP Product, Disney Streaming; Ankit Bhati, founder, Ola; Ashwini Asokan, founder, Mad Street Den; Pushkar Mukewar, founder, Drip Capital; and Yamini Bhat, founder, Vymo.
Murf will use the funds to drive further product innovation, accelerate R&D and scale its presence in focused geographies.
Founded in October 2020 by IIT-Kharagpur classmates Sneha Roy, Ankur Edkie, and Divyanshu Pandey, Murf provides an AI-enabled SaaS tool that allows users to generate “human-like” voiceovers for videos and presentations — without the need for complex recording equipment or hiring a voice artist.
In May of 2021, the company raised a $1.5 million seed funding round led by Elevation Capital and a few angel investors, which helped them recruit talent, invest in product innovation, and user acquisition. Since then, Murf has grown and synthesised more than 1 million voice-over projects.
According to market reports, the global text-to-speech market is expected to reach $7.06 billion by 2028, growing at a 14.7 percent CAGR. In addition, the voiceover and dubbing market is predicted to generate a total of $8 billion annually by 2027.
Tapping into this opportunity, Murf aims to make high-quality voiceovers accessible by placing a simple, 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.
While text-to-speech has been around for years, limitations in quality restricted the usage of the technology to primarily IVR and chatbots. Recent advances in AI and deep learning have 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 more than 120 human-parity AI voices offered by Murf Studio across 20-plus languages are rich with emotion and intonation. The start-up also is working towards bridging the diversity gap that exists in the 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.
“Synthetic media is poised to become omnipresent in the near future and voice is at the core of it. 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,” said Ankur Edkie, co-founder and CEO, Murf AI.
