Dubbing Platform Camb.Ai Secures $4M Seed Funding; Technology Recently Used To Dub Players Such As Novak Djokovic At Australian Open

Melanie Goodfellow
·3 min read
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Dubbing Platform Camb.ai, which has recently been used for coverage of the 2024 Australian Open tennis tournament as well as by horror feature Three, has raised $4M in a seed funding round.

Led by New York venture capital firm Courtside Ventures, the investor group includes TRTL Ventures, Blue Star Innovation Partners, Ikemori Ventures, and Eisaburo Maeda.

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TRTL and Dubai Future District Fund were early investors in the start-up.

Launched in 2022, UAE-based Camb.ai specializes in instantaneously dubbing any performance in over 100 languages, dialects and accents.

The company says it has broken several technological barriers with its MARS TTS and BOLI Translator programs, which it adds go beyond simply translating speech to also “capture and convey the speaker’s original tone and nuance”.

The platform also claims to have one of the largest collections of source languages, including languages such as Afrikaans, Malay, and Basque.

“This technology is truly remarkable,” said Vasu Kulkarni, Partner at lead investor Courtside Ventures.

“Growing up in India, a land of over 700 languages, I saw first-hand how difficult it was to consume the plethora of content out there when you couldn’t understand it. For NBA fans in India to now potentially be able watch Steph Curry while listening to the indelible Mike Breen commentating in Hindi is going to globalize the game even further.”

Cambi.ai was founded by CEO Avneesh Prakash and CTO Akshat Prakash, CTO, who spent a half-decade researching and building the technology.

To date, the platform has generated more than 100M views of its dubbed content and already counts Major League Soccer, Tennis Australia, Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, Nick DiGiovanni, Narin Beauty, BeerBiceps as clients.

Tennis Australia used the technology during the Australian Open in January to created dubbed packages of footage of players as part of a strategy to grow audiences and revenue for the tennis tournament.

One video released on YouTube shows Serbian player Novak Djokovic dubbed into Spanish with the real-life intonation of the player as he talked to the media about his semi-final defeat to Jannik Sinner at a press conference originally conducted in English.

The technology was also recently used by Emirati director Nayla Al Khaja for her horror film Three, which world premiered in Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea International Film Festival last December as the world’s first, fully AI-dubbed multilingual feature film.

“I wanted to ensure my movie was able to be viewed by a global audience in any language,” said Al Khaja. “Only Camb.ai could capture the emotional nuances blended with the horrific content and create a truly authentic experience for my viewers.”

The seed funding will power Camb.AI’s continued growth.

“This is a monumental day for Camb.Ai and we are excited to have an investor group that sees our vision and will help us grow,” said Avneesh Prakash.

“We’ve already seen amazing adoption of our technology and we expect this funding to fast track further development and global expansion.”

In addition to the seed funding, Camb.AI was also recently selected, from a pool of more than companies, by Major League Soccer (MLS) to be part of the inaugural cohort of the MLS Innovation Lab; with MLS planning to test CAMB.AI’s translation technology across their vast media ecosystem.

The Company was also selected for the 2024 AO Start-ups Program, a joint-venture between Tennis Australia, Wildcard Ventures and Techstars, with CAMB.AI’s technology most recently used to provide AI multi-lingual dubbing and translation from the 2024 Australian Open (AO).

“Making content that is more accessible and personalized for our global fans is an absolute priority for the AO,” Machar Reid, Head of Innovation, Tennis Australia. “Camb.ai has the potential to deepen our connection with these audiences in a way not previously thought possible.”

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